I don't see anyone panicking but there is talk and definite concern.

there are indeed studies that have been done on this.  antibody prevalence varies from 5-35% in various natives of the Congo, from one study i read that comes to memory.

here's a lay article from the NYT:
Many in West Africa May Be Immune to Ebola Virus

this will likely mean the R0 here in the USA will be higher than we have historically seen it in Africa.


ETA:  quote from article:

The fact some in Africa have antibodies to Ebola does not mean they had sub-clinical infections; it just means they got the virus and recovered.  Depending on the strain and the outbreak, up to 50% of patients recover from Ebola, which means you could have a small outbreak and expect to see some survivors.



People get sick and die in Africa all the time.  There are several deadly endemic diseases which mimic Ebola's symptoms, so an outbreak of Ebola in some remote village somewhere might get blamed on Typhoid or malaria unless there is a doctor who figured out something was different.



It's reasonable to assume there have been small, limited outbreaks of Ebola in Africa for thousands of years and no one paid attention until some European doctors noticed large numbers of people dying at the same time and applied epidemiological principles to discover the cause of the outbreak.



 

i like your point above, as the NYT article doesn't parse out whether those studied were subclinical infections, or recovered full-blown infections.  however, we do know that there exists subclinical infection with Ebola.  the NYT article mentions people in houses with multiple family members who died, yet did not get ill.  it is likely like all viruses; there are going to be some fraction who get only mild or no symptoms.

here's a more specific look at likely subclinical infection population antibody prevalence.  peep some of this & see if you find it interesting:

academic article source for below:

Yes because half the planet is going to be dead in less than 2 years from ebola. Did you know that the walking dead and last ship are not true stories?

It appears the Liberian government is suppressing the death totals.  Not surprising at all.





http://www.ar15.com/forums/t_1_5/1677493_.html



Article link in case other thread gets locked.



http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/19/ebola-liberia-death-toll-data-sorious-samura



 

My sister is involved in a Christian organization that has members and volunteers in west Africa.  She received the following.   I asked she forward anything else she receives.   I figure this to be as reliable as anything the msm is putting out.

An Ebola Update: 

Friends,

Our Young Life friends in Sierra Leone and Liberia are closing in on four months now of life/death with Ebola. They keep praying, going and hoping, but visibly they see a battle being lost. The numbers of infections and deaths are increasing--the World Health Organization says that in 2 months there will be 10,000 new infections each day if some significant intervention does not happen. The death rate has risen from a low of 52% to over 70% now.

The Liberian government has run out of money to pay health workers who are threatening to strike if their $500/month danger pay is not increased to $700/month. President Johnson of Liberia literally begged the workers’ union to continue working, explaining to them the government has no money. In what has been called by some a surrender, the government of Sierra Leone is now just giving families rubber gloves and some hydration salts and medicine and is telling people to treat Ebola victims at home because they lack space at Ebola treatment centers.

Here are some updates from our Young Life family in Liberia and Sierra Leone:

Our teacher staff in Freetown, Sahr Kamasie, lost his wife Victoria two nights ago. She was 29 years old, fell sick and died a few days later. She has left behind a 2-year-old son John and a 3-month-old baby Matilda with Sahr. Sahr has been waiting alone in his house with her body waiting for Ebola test results on her body to come back. The babies are at their grandmother’s house where they sent them as soon as Victoria was sick. Please pray for Sahr and the Sierra Leone team. The results will come back Thursday. If it was not Ebola (thousands of people are dying of many things other than Ebola every day because the healthcare system
can only handle Ebola cases) they will bury her body with just a few friends. If it is a positive test, Sahr and the children will be under quarantine.

Andrew Quimeh, one of our top volunteer leaders in Kakata, Liberia died of Ebola yesterday. He was on the Leadership Tree of our Area Director Yancy Dixon. A Campaigner kid from the same area – Greature Worr – was released Ebola-free from a treatment center after weeks of treatment, but she lost her father and her sister. Pray for Andrew's family, for Greature and for Yancy and his team.

Jeraline Johnson has two weeks left of her second 21-day quarantine. She is the only one left in the house as both her sister and brother-in-law have died of Ebola and her niece – 2 year-old Blessings – and Blessings’ Aunt were both diagnosed with Ebola and taken to a treatment center 8 days ago. I asked her what she does all day as she sits alone: "I pray and I read my Bible. Psalm 91 I pray constantly. I sing and I praise and thank God." Then she broke down in tears and sobbed with me on the phone for about 5 minutes and said, "Steve I am so so scared." There was good news today as Blessings' aunt was released after 8 days
of treatment from the Ebola center. At the end of the call she composed herself and said, "My hope is in Jesus alone. And He is faithful." We prayed Psalm 91 together.

Our Area Director from Robertsport and DGL graduate, Baccus Roberts, and two other leaders from Monrovia, Abraham and Gbeme, are all currently sick. We are praying that this is not Ebola. Pray for healing for them. 

James Davis, our regional director for Liberia and Sierra Leone, texted today, "Steve, I have to admit, I feel like giving up the fight, but if I do who will help lead kids and leaders. We have no peace, freedom, etc. Our people are dying every hour. Our hope is in Jesus, but we fear we may be the next Ebola victims. I can't bear this – Jesus we need you more." He later texted back to the whole team of Senior African leaders who are here now in Colorado, "I promise I will NOT give up – the Band of Brothers do not give up….I know that we are not in this alone – the Lord is with us. And so are you."

Please continue to lift our friends up and let's not grow weary. Let's be strong for them as they focus not on what is seen but what is unseen.

Thank you,

But they aren't reporting at all anymore.

  Thanks for posting that.  It sounds awful and those willingly there helping others are a true inspiration.

Up until they went dark they had reported around 2,500 deaths.



Which means the real total is probably twice that, if not more.  And between the chaos and government corruption we won't ever know the real number, just that a lot of people died.



 

Based on what we've seen from Liberia it sounds entirely believable.  The epidemic is out of control and spreading.



 

The most likely answer is that no one is bothering to report them.  Maybe next week we'll see Liberia say "LOL we forgot" and give a big total.  However, that might only be part of the reason.



The ominous factor is the entirely plausible accusation that Liberia is hiding the true case total in order to either prevent a panic or downplay the epidemic for political/economic reasons.  Ignorance and corruption will spread the virus even faster.



 

Wasn't there just an article about the healthcare workers walking out on strike and the patients leaving the hospitals to go home?

I don't think anybody is counting. Sounds like the healthcare system ( what little there was )collapsed.

I've read articles this past week which have suggested one or more of these reasons:





Health Ministry employees on strike, or ill, or even dead;





Corrupt bureaucrats trying to cover up the problem;





Distrustful family members not reporting illnesses or taking their loved ones to Ebola clinics;





Epidemic spreading faster than they can count;





Patients being turned away from clinics before they can be identified and diagnosed;





and





Areas where the number of cases can't be independently verified for safety reasons.





In reality, it's probably a combination of all of those factors, which means the system is collapsing -- if it hasn't stopped functioning already.  There probably isn't a country on earth more vulnerable to rapid spread of the virus than Liberia.





 

The government is making it worst by suppressing the numbers. You can't fix a problem if you keep lying to yourself and to the people that want to help you.



 

Many government ministers long ago abandoned Liberia.  There is no functioning government.

About a month ago, the CDC and WHO released some projections for West Africa.

The WHO paper was published on 9/23 in the New England Journal of Medicine and used a small dataset 8/3-9/14 for their projections. The CDC paper was released on 9/26, and they used a different type of model to fit a much broader dataset - essentially modeling from patient zero in each country.

I thought it'd be informative to put the WHO and CDC figures on the same chart and plot the future cases against the projections.  The CDC report, however, didn't have any projections for Guinea, so I took their model and did a best fit only through the 8/28 data that they used for Liberia and Sierra Leone (I may have posted a graph earlier in this thread where I used data through 10/12 for Guinea, but I thought it best to match the data that CDC would have had available at the time, so I put some blinders on and limited the dataset to 8/28 - surprisingly, there wasn't much difference between the two).

To give you an idea of fit, this is what the projections look like vs the reported cases:



In the 9/26 CDC paper, they outlined a suspicion that Liberia was under reporting cases, and outlined why they suspected the actual cases may be 2.5x higher, so that's why the CDC has two projections for Liberia.  It's also worth noting that the WHO used a "confirmed and probable" dataset for the projections they gave in the NEJM paper - for these graphs, however, I used their "confirmed, probable and suspected" dataset, as it aligned better with the to-date number of reported cases.

So, here is where we are today with respect to reported cases and projections, with more appropriate scaling of the y-axis:



So, why is the 101st Airborne in Liberia? According to Liberia's recently reported new-case-counts, they've got this thing under control, right?  I mean, the reported cases were tapering off!  But, the suspicion a month ago was that they were under reporting - and today we have anecdotal reports of lots of new cases daily.  

Without effective intervention, this is what Liberia may look like on 1/20/15:



WHO only made projections through 11/30, so I may extrapolate their projections based on an average doubling rate, and re-plot.

L_JE, thanks for the number crunching.

I had noted that Liberia "appeared" to be tapering off several days ago.  I agree with your conclusion.

I suspect Liberia is giving up, and its not even bad - yet.

This would be a good point in time to have our embassy in Monrovia start delaying non-essential visas.

All State has to do is hand down some innocuous marching orders for embassy staffers to "evaluate an applicant's risk based on address."  

This does two things:
1) it evaluates risk, duh
2) it slows the visa process down in a completely deniable manner - which lessens the odds of importing cases.

But, what's the current status on visas in Monrovia today?  The wait time is now half of what it was when Duncan boarded the plane.

It will be interesting to watch the numbers for Sierra Leone over the next few weeks.  They appear to have been increasing exponentially over the past month.



We might be seeing the start of a Liberia-style collapse there; the number of probable cases reported over the past three weeks has been steadily climbing, which suggests the labs can't keep up with the samples.



 

Your getting it all wrong.



All their numbers will drop, right after Obama has all the Ebola cases shipped back to the US just in time to vote in November.



 

Link for the Information Controllers.

Info Control link.

Liberia is "losing" Ebola patients:



http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/as-ebola-patients-vanish-in-liberias-health-system-survivors-go-on-a-desperate-search/2014/10/20/274acf48-08dd-4a76-9f58-8c35dfb22312_story.html

To get an idea of how many cases are going missing in Liberia, I used the numbers from the recent UN reports.



From October 10th to October 17th, Guinea reported 169 new Ebola cases which was an increase of 13%.  Sierra Leone reported 460 cases, an increase of 16%.



Liberia only reported 186 cases, an increase of only 5%.  From the October 15th to the October 17th report, they only reported thirteen new cases in the entire country.



If Liberia had seen an increase similar to Sierra Leone's, then they should have reported 636 cases -- meaning there are 450 "missing" cases from last week.



During the past month, from the September 18th report to the October 17th report, Guinea reported 577 new cases, an increase of 61%.  Sierra Leone reported 1,737 cases, an increase of 104%.



Assuming Liberia saw the same increase during the past month as Sierra Leone, then there should have been 1,266 more cases in Liberia reported by now.

Per the CDC projections and the travel patterns published in The Lancet, they may now be seeing 1-2 infected people per day at the int'l airport in Monrovia - assuming 2013 travel rates.

If I were in Liberia and suspected that I had Ebola, I'd be on the next flight out to the US.

Spoken like someone who's never had to get a US visa.

Here's an estimate of air travel from Liberia to destinations that account for 89% of international travel from Liberia.

It uses the abovementioned CDC estimates, and borrows travel information from an article published in The Lancet yesterday.  The Lancet authors also factored in a 51% reduction in travel from Liberia, whereas the chart below uses the full 2013 travel patterns.

The Lancet article uses a fixed number of active cases (1,707 for Liberia) in their projections - this is the "sum of the number of confirmed, probable, and suspected cases in the past 21 days to estimate active cases as of Sept 21, 2014".

Using a static case count for a situation that is experiencing exponential growth seems to be a shortcoming of the Lancet article, but they provide enough information such that the reader can adjust for growth and under reporting.  Thus, I took their work one step further by incorporated the CDC time-based projections.

My model is projecting 4,165 symptomatic cases, plus 2,895 pre-symptomatic cases for 9/21 - this correlates to 10,169 cumulative cases for Liberia on 9/21 (as a point of reference, Wikipedia lists a cumulative case count of =3,280 for 9/21)




ETA:
The Lancet article can be found here: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)61828-6/abstract

I bet you got crazy amounts of pussy in high school.  

Let me consult my spreadsheet.

But seriously, that's fantastic work.  Way more relevant than anything I'm seeing on news sites.

A friend of mine's pastor in Sierra Leone said there were at least 1000 people dying a week and this was three weeks ago.

We have 30,000,000 illegals that didn't bother with visas.

They would still have to get visas to Mexico, or Central America.  As of September in West Africa, they are averaging 7.5 days from symptoms to death, with a 9.4 day suspected incubation.  That's a very small window, especially for people with few resources.  Spill-over into neighboring African nations is the larger threat.

I have found GD to always be a better overall source of news than the MSM.  I've read stories here that got duped by the national Media 2-3 days later, long after the GD thread got locked for personal attacks or BOTD violations.  



 

Liberia.  What the heck is going on in Liberia?





[This was mostly posted in the Ebola US thread, but it's more pertinent to the Africa thread, so I'm reposting, and adding some additional information at the bottom, in blue.]

Liberia

From 10/6 to 10/11, there were 57 total new cases reported to WHO, but the article suggests that there were 138 suspected and probable cases in Monrovia, alone.  This covers a six day time period.

Monrovia has a population 970,000, compared to 4,429,000 for all of Liberia.  Assuming an even distribution of the virus, that indicates that there should have been closer to 630 reported cases from 10/6-10/11 - a far cry from the 57 cases they reported.

The analysis by CDC indicates that we should be seeing 280 to 650 new cases per day during this time frame.

The case counts being reported by Liberia are orders of magnitude lower than the projections.

Sierra Leone

Over the same time period, 10/6-10/11, there were 326 new cases reported to WHO. This increase in cases slightly outpaces the CDC projections, but is in line with the WHO projections.

Balance of Effort

About 6 new cases a day in Liberia, versus roughly 60 new cases a day in Sierra Leone (10-6-10/11) ...

This begs the question: Why are US troops even in Liberia?  By all measures, we should have focused relief efforts on Sierra Leone.  

We should be telling Liberia that they don't need us.  Maybe that would help to get a straight story out of them?

Using the stats reported from Liberia, and using a 9 day incubation rate and 8 days from symptoms to death [WHO], they should have about 390 sick people at the moment, perhaps with additional 200 who have turned the corner and are on their way to recovering.  But, at these rates, by the time we get these facilities built, there will be no one left to treat.

Where Does the Truth Lie?

The Liberian government is spinning a tale that WHO, MSF and the US Govt doesn't believe.  According to Liberia's reporting, the ETUs should be clearing out by this week.  I'll forecast through from the last report (10/14) for a present bed projection, but I expect the model is going to show nearly empty ETUs - which is something that will run counter to what MSF [Medecins sans Frontieres] is seeing right now.

We only have reported data through 10/14, so I ran extended the model from 10/14 to 10/22 based on the 6 cases/day rate last reported by Liberian officials....

163 currently symptomatic people in all of Liberia.  That's what my model shows using 9 day incubation and 8 day symptom-to-death parameters.  That compares to 840 symptomatic on 9/15.  That's an 80% reduction in bed-count in the span of a month.  An 80% bed reduction.  Makes you wonder if MSF would concur with that figure.  My guess is, no.

So, what happened?

We have heard the reports of healthcare workers walking away from their jobs and 'hospitals'  being abandoned.

Same thing with govt officials.

I think it is clear, IMO anyway, that Liberia has collapsed.

I don't know why we are not getting info on what is going on since we have the US Military in Monrovia. The US military should know exactly what is going on. They may not have numbers, but they would be aware of what the conditions are like, and still we have crickets.

So either nothing has changed, or it has gotten very bad.  Of course maybe the decision was made to go to Monrovia because we knew Liberia infrastructure was about to collapse.

I believe cases are increasing, and the Liberians are under reporting in fear of being cut off from the outside world.

But, I don't believe it has gotten very bad - yet.  They may be in the range of 1 in 300 being symptomatic.  Medicine and human psychology are not my thing, but I can see how a 1 in 300 problem could still be wished away and denied by authorities.  By the 3rd week of November, they may be reaching the 1 in 100 mark, where it will be far more difficult to wish away the problem.  [These figures account for suspected under reporting, so divide by 2.5 for figures that are in better agreement with reported case counts through the beginning of September, whereupon case counts started getting inexplicably "better" - things are so "good" that a brigade-sized group of US personnel were sent in.]

This last paragraph from the allafrica.com story may give some insight/motivation to the government reported figures ...

A fitting radio station call sign in the land of hemorrhagic fever ...