Is Ebola Over?

According to the New Yorker, Fox News has officially ended its coverage of Ebola as of today. Does this mean that Ebola is over? Well, obviously not, but Nature News also raised the question of whether early models of the disease's spread were accurate, since so far the number of cases and deaths in Liberia, for example, have been below the model estimates.

Epidemiologists normally use mathematical models to estimate the trajectory of an outbreak, and to estimate where and how to direct scarce medical resources. But for the current crisis, on-the-ground data contradict the projections of published models, says Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London, and a member of the WHO’s multidisciplinary Ebola Response Team.

The very first thought I had when reading this was the tremendous flack that Paul Ehrlich has taken over the decades for "incorrectly" predicting that continued population growth would lead to famine and death. As he said in the Population Bomb and has repeated often since then, the "penalty" for being wrong is that fewer people die--but would that have happened if he had not helped to raise the alarm? This strikes me as a similar situation. Models that showed what could happen if the disease went uncontrolled may well have contributed to the global response, which seems to be picking up. On that score, I thanks Professor Rumbaut for linking me to a New Yorker story about Cuba's response team that has been sent to Sierra Leone to head off the spread of Ebola there. He also provided a link to a great map of Africa--the "true size" of Africa--reminding us how far any disease has to travel in order to spread throughout that incredibly vast continent. Take a good look at this to get the perspective.