That reminds me, I have to call in my football picks.
"Scientists try to predict number of US Ebola cases" by Martha Mendoza | Associated Press November 02, 2014
STANFORD, Calif. —No one knows for sure how many infections will emerge in the United States or anywhere else, but scientists have made educated guesses based on data models....
Like the climate change ones?
‘‘I don’t think there’s going to be a huge outbreak here, no,’’ said David Relman, a professor of infectious disease, microbiology, and immunology at Stanford University medical school. ‘‘However, as best we can tell right now, it is quite possible that every major city will see at least a handful of cases.’’
You have been warned.
He is a founding member of the US Department of Health and Human Services advisory board for biosecurity and chairs the National Academy of Sciences forum on microbial threats.
Until now, projections published in top medical journals by the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control have focused on worst-case scenarios for West Africa, concluding that cases in the United States will be episodic, but minimal, but the projections are complicated, but Ebola has been a fairly predictable virus — extremely infectious, contagious only through contact with body fluids, requiring no more than 21 days for symptoms to emerge. Human behavior is far less predictable — people get on airplanes, shake hands, misdiagnose, even lie.
I know where you can predict lies with regularity. I read one every morning.
Pandemic risk expert Dominic Smith, a senior manager for life risks at Newark, Calif.-based RMS, a catastrophe-modeling firm, ran a US simulation that projected 15 to 130 cases between now and the end of December. That’s less than one case per 2 million people.
Smith’s method assumes that most cases imported to the United States will be American medical professionals who worked in West Africa and returned home.
Smith said the high end may be a bit of an overestimate because it does not include the automatic quarantining measures that some areas in the United States are implementing.
Those quarantines ‘‘could both reduce the number of contacts for imported cases, as well as increase the travel burden on — and perhaps reduce the number of — United States volunteers planning to support the effort in West Africa,’’ he said....
In an article in the journal PLOS ONE, Northeastern University professor Alessandro Vespignani and a team of colleagues said the probability of international spread outside the African region is small, but not negligible. Longer term, they say international dissemination will depend on what happens in West Africa in the next few months....
During which the vaccine-makers will clean up.
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Also see: NYC doctor with Ebola upgraded to stable condition
Related: Exhausted by Ebola Coverage
Looks like you will have to scroll and search for more on this fraud yourself. Sorry.
