April 2014: Only 1 case of Ebola in Liberia. Experts say risk of spread is "very low."
In April, there was one known case of Ebola in Liberia. By November, about 10,000 Liberian cases are estimated, according to a NEJM study by the WHO. And this is one of the more conservative estimates. The CDC says that in another 4 months, the number of “official” victims in Liberia and Sierra Leone could total more than 550,000.
http://allafrica.com/stories/201404030636.html
FROM APRIL 2014 – 6 months ago
The U.S. Embassy in Monrovia has been advised that a woman confirmed to have Ebola has traveled to the Firestone Plantation Camp in Monrovia. . . . This woman is the only person in Liberia confirmed to have Ebola at this time.
Currently, the woman with Ebola and her family are quarantined in their home until they can be moved to an appropriate facility. Contacts from the initial taxi, the taxi driver, and the motorcycle driver have been identified and are being followed closely by the Liberian Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (MOHSW) and the World Health Organization. The MOHSW is coordinating identification, tracking, and preparing isolation plans.
Risk of transmission remains very low as Ebola is contracted through contact with blood and body fluids or contaminated articles. Symptoms may appear anywhere from 2 to 21 days after exposure to Ebola virus, though 8-10 days is most common.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1411100#t=articleTop
As of September 14, the doubling time of the epidemic was 15.7 days in Guinea, 23.6 days in Liberia, and 30.2 days in Sierra Leone (Table 2). We estimate that, at the current rate of increase, assuming no changes in control efforts, the cumulative number of confirmed and probable cases by November 2 (the end of week 44 of the epidemic) will be 5740 in Guinea, 9890 in Liberia, and 5000 in Sierra Leone, exceeding 20,000 cases in total. The true case load, including suspected cases and undetected cases, will be higher still.
https://student.societyforscience.org/article/ebola-epidemic-could-top-1-million-cdc-warns
Sixty-one members of an Ebola Response Team authored the New England Journal of Medicine report. The World Health Organization, or WHO, convened this group of experts. The experts scoured recent health reports to detail the infection sweeping through five West African countries. Throughout the past nine months, they now conclude, the death rate in each country has been about the same: roughly 7 in every 10 people who get Ebola.
As scary as such numbers are, they are not the most pessimistic ones. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, issued its own update on September 23. This government agency is based in Atlanta, Ga. The CDC now predicts that within a week, West Africa’s Ebola outbreak could top 8,000 victims. That’s just the “official” number. Experts at the CDC believe the actual infection numbers are 2.5 times as high as those that get reported. That would mean that by September 30, Ebola already would have sickened 21,000 people.
Even more worrisome, the official number of Ebola victims — just in Liberia and Sierra Leone — could reach 550,000 within another four months, the CDC says. That would translate to an estimated 1.4 million victims (after accounting for infections that never got officially reported). These dire figures appear in an “early release” report in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
All of the CDC and WHO projections assume that no improvements are made to control the disease. Yet it is still possible to get the disease under control and stop its spread, health-care officials say. Key to making the outbreak shrink, not swell, will be isolating the sick from the healthy. Such a separation of infected people is known as a quarantine.
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