In case you were wondering, Ebola is still a thing, and it's still tearing West Africa apart. The latest manifestation of this is the Vice President of Sierra Leone putting himself in voluntary quarantine after one of his security guards died of Ebola. Quoting:
Vice President Samuel Sam-Sumana voluntarily decided to quarantine himself for 21 days following the death from Ebola last Tuesday of one of his security personnel, according to a report issued late Saturday by the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Corporation.
Surprised? You shouldn't be. Ebola disappeared from the American media after a
very small scare in Dallas, but it's been an ongoing fight in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea for over a year now.
More below the squiggle:
To get a good handle on what's really going on with the Ebola epidemic, it's best to consult the World Health Organization's now-weekly reports on the epidemic. The latest one is from February 25th. Here are some of the highlights.
- So far this outbreak has seen 23,729 cases of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD), including 9,604 fatalities. (This is not to imply that the disease has a 9,604/23,729, or roughly 40%, fatality rate, as not all of those 23,729 cases have run through to completion.)
- There were 99 new cases reported up to Feb 22nd, most of these (63) in Sierra Leone, with 35 in Guinea, and 1 in Liberia.
- A majority of the time, medical officials have no idea how the virus was transmitted. This is in part because many of the sick are in remote areas to which medical officials have little or no access.
- Sierra Leone made a lot of progress halting EVD in December, but that progress has hit a brick wall. (The report does NOT mention the remarkable progress made in Liberia, which last November had the worst transmission rate.)
- As one can see from the graphs of new cases reported each week, new EVD cases peaked in September in Liberia and in December in Sierra Leone. All three of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea have seen remarkable declines in cases since December. However -- and this is me editorializing -- that brings us to the depressing scenario where this epidemic never ends, but just continues in a slow burn the way AIDS has.
As should be clear by now, Ebola hasn't gone away. It's still, in fact, a big problem in West Africa. There is still a good chance that it will show up again somewhere else; if it does, we can probably prevent it from gaining a foothold there, but that's going to require lots of well-marshaled resources. Keep this in mind while Congress fiddles with the budget.