Quarantine Accelerates Ebola Spread

Looks like Liberia's mass quarantine made the epidemic worse and triggered the current exponential spread. So Sierra Leone just instituted another quarantine this weekend, against experts' advice. Gotta wonder why.

Ebola Outbreak: 6,800 New Cases Predicted This Month

New Ebola cases could reach 6,800 in West Africa by the end of the month, according to a recent study.

Researchers from Arizona State and Harvard universities discovered through modeling analysis that the rate of rise in cases significantly increased last month in Liberia and Guinea, around the time that a mass quarantine was put in place. This finding indicates that the mass quarantine may have made the outbreak worse than it would have been otherwise.

T emporal Variations in the Effective Reproduction Number of the 2014 West Africa Ebola Outbreak

……If effective control measures are not put in place, and the current rate of exponential rise of new cases continues, we predict 4400 new Ebola cases in West Africa during the last half of the month of September, with an upper 95% confidence level of 6800 new cases.

…..The temporal patterns we observe may thus partly be due to variations in surveillance during the outbreak, under-reporting, and/or reporting delays. In addition, serial passage of the disease as the outbreak progresses may be leading to increased pathogenicity, and a subsequent increasingly larger rate of increase in case counts . However, it also must be considered that otherwise well intentioned attempts at intervention may in fact be making the situation worse, at least in some regions….

…….Our analysis indicates that the spread of the disease to densely populated cities, and/or the imposition of cordons sanitaire (quarantine) in West Africa may have accelerated the spread of the disease in some regions.

Said it would 4 to a house on average in close proximity for 4 days when they advise the complete opposite.

a reply to: soficrow

Sorry, but I cannot believe a mass quarantine would cause even more infections. Let me re-word that-it probably did. They just kept from spreading elsewhere. That's all.

a reply to: tinker9917

Would you prefer been stuck in a room with a infected person for 4 days or freedom or movement for 4 days?

originally posted by: joho99
a reply to: tinker9917

Would you prefer been stuck in a room with a infected person for 4 days of freedom of movement for 4 days?

If I had had sick people in my home or not, I'd feel obligated to be quarantined. If there was sick ones in my house, I'm probably gonna have it anyway. Why take it elsewhere?

a reply to: tinker9917

Point is you would not know to start.
Or you would not agree to it in the first place.

Freedom of movement you would have a choice to avoid obvious infection points .

Zero choice if you are stuck in a room with a infected person so you would increase the infection rate after the 4 days you probably might not even know you are infected .

It spreads in close quarters over a prolonged period and they have just confined 6 million to close quarters for a prolonged period it does not take a genus to work it out

a reply to: joho99

But, if you've been around an infected person for a while, without them showing symptoms, you could be infected and you would then be obligated to quarantine.

Stopping person to person contact as much as possible is how this will end.

Just my opinion.

a reply to: tinker9917
You are missing the point you would not know.
ie 4 days is way to short to know but just right to spread it.

And you will always have a percentage who think it can not happen to them regardless of the evidence

I feel really bad for the sick people in Africa. It is a sad tragedy. Life is sad sometimes. There is no cure and no vaccine.
I know what the farmers and governments do when they get swine flu in the pigs and mad cow disease In the cows. They have to exterminate them so more animals and humans don't become ill. In humans we are acting caring and humanly towards the sick, enabling more people to becoming sick. The solutions are more complicated due to our ethics and morals. The USA is making a nice gesture of sending aid and troops. However, I feel that more people will become sick, the USA troops and doctors.

The people in West Africa are on fire. They can quarantine the areas with boarders so no one leaves those four countries for the next year. I don't think this can be stopped unless they do this. 10 to 50% will survive.... Health care sanitation needs to be taught there if possible. The area has really dirty hygiene and this brewed up a nasty incurable disease, it is very contagious and spreading. Anyone could get it. The countries could separate the sick from the healthy, but it would be very time consuming and expensive. They do this in doctors offices for the waiting room areas. I don't know what the relief effort can do other than quarantine and put the sick people in separate areas. I pray everyday this will stop. I heard the CDC administrator say on TV viruses don't respect borders. He was referring to the respiratory illness in the USA that children are getting currently. That really alarms me.

a reply to: tinker9917

said in my edit

It spreads in close quarters over a prolonged period and they have just confined 6 million to close quarters for a prolonged period it does not take a genus to work it out

a reply to: joho99

Well, if my family member or my child was sick... I would stay and take care of them pretty much knowing I was sick too. I would not leave them to "go take my chances elsewhere".

I'd quarantine myself and do the best I could to take of my dying family rather than desert them.

It seems these folks in the area are so afraid. They have probably been lied to and felt abandoned by their leaders, and from what I have been able to read about this area. Alot of these folks in the area are not well educated.

I believe God (or a higher power) has a reason for everything. I'm not saying we should just say Oh Well. But something that seems to make sense to some, can be a totally foreign thought to others. You know what you live, and you live what you know.

We need to find a way to help (or teach, if you will) how to control this. It seems like the Doctors on the ground know how people think in the area. We need to be listening to them.

a reply to: tinker9917

Because you can afford to but they mostly live hand to mouth food and water for the day and half of them do not even think it is true others think it can be cured with things like salt the equivalent in the west would be vitamin c or silver.


you need to stop thinking everyone thinks like you it will be the death of you if this spreads.

a reply to: crappiekat

You are so right. We can only imagine how frightened they are.

I have two bottles of bleach in my house, months of food. All kinds of supplies. Which most likely is not the case for them.

a reply to: soficrow

I believe it could be true, as we know the government have people in Sierra the Leo on house arrest, with martial law, plus they are sweeping the streets picking the sick and those believe to have symptoms and taking them forcibly into treatment centers, but I am sure that in the haste of picking up the sick they could be doing this indiscriminately and the healthy is been caught up in the sweep, causing them to become infected, because of the panic, this could be causing the increase in the amount of infected.

Truly sad.

a reply to: joho99

And see that is why they need more help. Quarantine, with food and water and supplirs delivered outside their door as needed in an appropriate manner from outside help. We need to keep person to person contact minimal until it is contained.

But ya.. the reality of this ever happening is nill, nada, zilch.

a reply to: tinker9917

My point and the point of the thread is officially it spreads in close quarters and given time and they have just placed 6 million people in close quarters for 96hours.

But worse it is only for 96 hours

The 2 things you should not do if you do not want it to spread.

originally posted by: tinker9917
a reply to: soficrow

Sorry, but I cannot believe a mass quarantine would cause even more infections. Let me re-word that-it probably did. They just kept from spreading elsewhere. That's all.

If you tell everyone they must stock up and prepare to stay indoors for days at a time, that would boost the infection rate as they all went to market to stock up before going indoors.

This is a situation with which you are damned if you do and damned if you don't. These people have death at there door no matter what they do. They are seeing death all around them.

People who don't live in that area, don't understand what they are going though. I have never faced death like these people are. I hope and pray I never do.

But if we don't find a way to stop this, we may be all in a situation where we will be fearing this horrible nightmare.

a reply to: stormcell


When they issue (demand) a quarantine, do they allow you shopping time first? I don't know... just asking. But I seriously doubt it. Im pretty sure it would be a martial law type state of events. Probably promising aid and relief that would never arrive