Ebola - my visual charts & projections based on WHO data

I don't think this has been posted yet. People have made reference to things looking dismal. According to the Washington Post, in regards to Liberia:

"The demands of the Ebola outbreak have completely outstripped the government’s and partners’ capacity to respond," the WHO warned.

and they have further stated:

"The patients are hungry, they are starving. No food, no water," a "terrified woman" told Reuters. "The government needs to do more. Let Ellen Johnson Sirleaf do more!"

It's no wonder that people are not seeking out help from doctors and the government.

Although the dire predictions remain just that -- predictions -- the fact that the WHO and Liberia's own government are sounding the alarm so loudly is doing little to calm people in the country. Residents in Monrovia, according to AFP, "described an atmosphere of fear paralyzing daily life" there, particularly after the WHO's prediction of a spike in Ebola infections.

They have lost all hope.

"I am afraid," 45-year-old Kluboh Johnson said, according to AFP. "I don't know what to do now actually. Where are we going? Are we all going to die? If WHO can say this kind of thing it means we are finished."

Was hington Post

My other thought is that Obama has now announced that he will be sending 3,000 troops to assist in containment. That's good, but a bit late. At this point, I think that it is purely political. Ebola is now out of control and, after everyone's dead, he just wants to be able to say he didn't sit by and do nothing.

So much for a happy day.

Bishop

Ikonoklast, I think your charts and projections will look optimistic when we reach December 2014...

Have you seen what the WHO is saying now? "With a faster response, cases could be kept in the tens of thousands". Even scarier (scariest?): "this Ebola outbreak is a crisis unparalleled in modern times".

Source

New numbers came out today ! apps.who.int...

armakirais

a reply to: armakirais

Looks like countries' reports are spotty and incomplete - Liberia's last report was September 9 - they're probably all totally overwhelmed.

a reply to: Bishop2199
How many of the troops becoming infected...is an acceptable number?
How would you like to open your orders and find that you are among the 3,000-or-so assigned this duty?
And - what happens if these soldiers...because of forced proximity to a potentially infected populace become infected en masse... Do we leave them there? Give them the old VA Hospital routine?
I know that something must be done...but am simply looking at some of the possible ramifications of said action/s.

originally posted by: armakirais
New numbers came out today ! apps.who.int...

Thanks. I'll probably have the charts updated tomorrow or so.

originally posted by: soficrow
a reply to: armakirais

Looks like countries' reports are spotty and incomplete - Liberia's last report was September 9 - they're probably all totally overwhelmed.

Liberia actually has issued another Situation Report that went through September 11th. For some reason the WHO didn't include those numbers in their update today. I'm not sure when it was actually posted, but the PDF says it was created on September 13th.

I think you're right that they are all totally overwhelmed.

originally posted by: negue
Ikonoklast, I think your charts and projections will look optimistic when we reach December 2014...

Have you seen what the WHO is saying now? "With a faster response, cases could be kept in the tens of thousands". Even scarier (scariest?): "this Ebola outbreak is a crisis unparalleled in modern times".

Source

Unfortunately, I think that you may be right. Even In President Obama's speech yesterday (Tuesday) from the CDC, he said:

Today, thousands of people in West Africa are infected.

That number could rapidly grow to tens of thousands. And if the outbreak is not stopped now, we could be looking at hundreds of thousands of people infected...

President Obama's speech at the CDC

This was originally published on Deutsche Welle a few days ago:

Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg told DW that he and his colleagues are losing hope for Sierra Leone and Liberia, two of the countries worst hit by the recent Ebola epidemic.

"The right time to get this epidemic under control in these countries has been missed," he said. That time was May and June. "Now it is too late."

Schmidt-Chanasit expects the virus will "burn out itself" in this part of the world.

With other words: It will more or less infect everybody and half of the population - in total about five million people - could die.

After that went viral on sites like Info Wars, Deutsche Welle went back and edited the article. But you can read the original text through the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive:

Wayback Machine Internet Archive of unedited Deutsche Welle article
(Link shortened with Google URL shortener because the original link format gets broken by the ATS post editor)

Of course, this is what the Ebola Charts 4E and 5E project for Liberia.

Allegedly the US State Department recently put out a bid for 160,000 hazmat suits. I haven't found it on a federal website yet, but this press release from a company that manufactures hazmat suits is being quoted all over the place:

"With the U.S. State Department alone putting out a bid for 160,000 suits, we encourage all protective apparel companies to increase their manufacturing capacity for sealed seam garments so that our industry can do its part in addressing this threat to global health."

SOURCE: MarketWatch

a reply to: ikonoklast

I commented on Schmidt-Chanasit's "analysis" when it was published - making the point that he and the Bernhard Nocht Institute are historically linked to Eugenics policies (from the Nazi era to more recently). I suspect his take on the Ebola epidemic is informed more by Eugenics bias than current scientific understanding.

Most critical, the virus is mutating rapidly - the longer H2H transmission occurs, the more mutations will accumulate. This raises the specter of airborne transmission but most important, threatens the viability of new treatments and vaccines - all developed for specific strains. Point being, if new strains emerge, treatments and vaccines in development will be obsolete before production even starts.

The only real solution is to try and stop the epidemic in West Africa. Yes, it may be too late. But there's still a chance so we have to try - because NOT trying just guarantees failure.

Virologist Schmidt-Chanasit of the Bernhard Nocht Institute, linked to Eugenics policies, says we need to just let it "burn itself out" in West Africa. Right. Let it spread, mutate and evolve, and infect animals with the new airborne strain. Then what? Napalm Africa to kill all the infected animals - and now-immune humans?

One of them luxury apartments in the empty citys is looking real good at the moment.

originally posted by: soficrow
a reply to: ikonoklast

I commented on Schmidt-Chanasit's "analysis" when it was published - making the point that he and the Bernhard Nocht Institute are historically linked to Eugenics policies (from the Nazi era to more recently). I suspect his take on the Ebola epidemic is informed more by Eugenics bias than current scientific understanding.

Thanks for the info, sofi. This is the second time you've pointed out to me in the Ebola threads that I've quoted or linked to German experts or groups of experts and institutions with such a history. I double-checked to be sure this wasn't the same person and institution we talked about before, and it's not.

So we have multiple virologists/epidemiologists with interests in Ebola working for German medical institutes that have histories of eugenics and Nazi involvement and that are run by the current German government . It may be that it would be hard to find a medical institute in Germany more than 70 years old that didn't have such a history, or it may be that this is almost as frightening as the Ebola epidemic!

The only real solution is to try and stop the epidemic in West Africa. Yes, it may be too late. But there's still a chance so we have to try - because NOT trying just guarantees failure.

That's for sure.

a reply to: ikonoklast

...This is the second time you've pointed out to me in the Ebola threads that I've quoted or linked to German experts or groups of experts and institutions with such a history. I double-checked to be sure this wasn't the same person and institution we talked about before, and it's not.

So we have multiple virologists/epidemiologists with interests in Ebola working for German medical institutes that have histories of eugenics and Nazi involvement and that are run by the current German government . It may be that it would be hard to find a medical institute in Germany more than 70 years old that didn't have such a history, or it may be that this is almost as frightening as the Ebola epidemic!

I didn't realize that, but I always "check the sources," their backgrounds and their history for conflict-of-interest etc. fyi - Eugenics never died - it just went underground after WW2 and got re-packaged as "genetics." I think you'd be surprised at how often Eugenics principles -mistakenly- "inform" medical and other policies - up to and including coverage terms for public and private medical insurance.

I've updated the Ebola charts with the data published by WHO on September 16, 2014 and with Situation Reports from the governments of Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. The known data covers through September 13, 2014. I'm splitting the charts over five posts since there are a lot of different charts now. This is post 1 of 5.

Click any graphic below to see it full-size.

Chart 3 still has the unchanged line projections but with the new known data added.

The same disclaimers and references apply to all of these charts:

Charts and future projections were done by me, not by WHO. I am not an Ebola expert, epidemiologist, virologist, or MD, but I manually compiled the data used to create these graphs from news updates on the following websites:

SOURCE: WHO website 1

SOURCE: WHO website 2

SOURCE: WHO website 3

SOURCE: WHO website 4

SOURCE: The New England Journal of Medicine

Liberia - Ministry of Health and Social Welfare

Sierra Leone - Ministry of Health and Sanitation

Humanitarian Response - Archives of Situation Reports and Documents

Please do not do anything you might regret based on charts or projections. Hopefully efforts to contain, quarantine, treat, prevent, or cure Ebola will eventually be successful, and hopefully sooner rather than later.

The numbers do not yet include the Ebola outbreak in the Congo. Currently that is believed to be unrelated to this outbreak. If that situation changes or if the Congo outbreak is not contained, I may add it to these charts or create separate charts.

Post 2 of 5 - previous post in series: ikonoklast

More of the Ebola outbreak charts with the newest data from WHO and the governments of Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. The data covers through September 13, 2014. This is post 2 of 5.

Click any graphic below to see it full-size.

Chart 4 is the same case projection range as previously but with the known data updated.

Charts 4B-4E are new projections generated automatically from known data through September 13, 2014.

See the post above with Charts 1-3 for the standard disclaimers and references that apply to all of these charts.

Post 3 of 5 - previous post in series: ikonoklast

More of the Ebola outbreak charts with the newest data from WHO and the governments of Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. The data covers through September 13, 2014. This is post 3 of 5.

Click any graphic below to see it full-size.

Chart 5 is the same deaths projection range as previously but with the known data updated.

Charts 5B-5E are new death projections generated automatically from known data through September 13, 2014.

See the post above with Charts 1-3 for the standard disclaimers and references that apply to all of these charts.

Post 4 of 5 - previous post in series: ikonoklast

More of the Ebola outbreak charts with the newest data from WHO and the governments of Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. The data covers through September 13, 2014. This is post 4 of 5.

Click any graphic below to see it full-size.

Chart 6 has the y-axis in powers of 2 so you can see the rate at which total cases and total deaths are doubling.

Charts 7-10 show new cases and new deaths.

See the post above with Charts 1-3 for the standard disclaimers and references that apply to all of these charts.

a reply to: ikonoklast

Thank you OP this is one of the best threads I have seen on this sight.......Really good. This is a much bigger deal than most people give it credit. It will continue to spread and 3000 troops will not stop it. This could very well be a run for the hills event if it keeps going like this.

Post 5 of 5 - previous post in series: ikonoklast

I've updated the Ebola charts with the data published by WHO on September 16, 2014 and with Situation Reports from the governments of Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. The known data covers through September 13, 2014.

Charts 11 and 12 were not updated, as they would not have really had any new useful information until there is more data for this month.

Click any graphic below to see it full-size.

Charts 13-14 show total cases and deaths by country.

Chart 15 shows how the doubling rate has varied over time. The y-axis shows how many days it took for cases to double for any given date on the x-axis. So reading this chart is essentially the opposite of other charts - high spikes are good (it's not doubling as fast), low spikes are bad (it's doubling faster).

See the post above with Charts 1-3 for the standard disclaimers and references that apply to all of these charts.

a reply to: SubTruth

Thanks, I appreciate the feedback and I'm glad you like the thread.

When I first started this thread, it was not widely recognized how big of a deal it is. I originally ran the numbers and did the charts for my own curiosity. I had a feeling the projections would be pretty bad and that the long-term trend would be pretty obvious if I graphed them. And I figured graphs might help more people clearly see where it's all heading if something cannot be done to change that.

Now virologists and epidemiologists are coming out with their graphs and projections that generally match the ones in this thread pretty closely. Some are even worse. And even the President of the US is giving speeches talking about how Ebola could infect hundreds of thousands if it's not stopped now. Others are starting to talk numbers in the millions and whole national populations (as pointed out in Charts 4E and 5E for Liberia).

I hope that the attention results in enough action quickly so that the spread can be stopped somehow. It's going to take a monumental effort.

a reply to: ikonoklast

ikonoklast, thank you so much for keeping these charts and numbers updated.

I was curious, would you mind also providing the raw data you’ve accumulated? One of the reasons why there are so few other 3rd parties working on models is the spin-up time to collect the historical data, which you’re doing a fantastic job with.

Was thinking perhaps making a google doc with the numbers you’re using that can stay updated when you add new numbers and create new graphs, and that can be a data set that others can use as a starting point for their own models?

Thanks!

First off ditto on the thanks to Icon, I've been following this thread from the start and really appreciate the effort to keep it up to date. The sad part is, we didn't need you to update the graphs....all we had to do is follow your original projection and know the current date! But now with your hard work and updates no one can remain in denial or ignorance about how serious this is. It took scholars with computers and fancy theories about transmission factors and all to reach the same conclusions you did with a sheet of semi-log graph paper. That's why it's undeniable, the simplicity, not much to argue with except the sampling-to-actual ratio. And for me that's what makes this a great ATS thread...all the professional contrarians are on the sidelines.