I'll agree that a few cases an "outbreak" does not make. However, what is going to prevent the next case from involving a "breach of protocol?" If a hospital can't contain a single patient's disease, what are they going to do if there actually is an epidemic?

I think we need to take this a bit more seriously and pull out the stops to get ahead of things. Panic obviously isn't going to help anybody, but are we really doing all that we can to prevent an actual outbreak?

That is only counting healthcare workers wearing space suits.

I'm not saying that we should give up hope on containing Ebola. I'm just saying that we should be pulling out all the stops. By all means aid those who have been affected by the disease, but let's be a LOT more serious about quarantines to prevent its spread.

If I called up the FBI and told them that I had anthrax in my basement they'd send in a small army. If I called up the CDC and told them that I had lunch with the guy who had Ebola they'd tell me to stay home and call them if I get a fever. Maybe we should be less worried about saving money, and more worried about whether I decide I get tired of staying home and just make one quick trip to the grocery store.

Thus proving my point. There is no such thing as truly ideal conditions, and if your disease management program starts with assuming that things are ideal it is going to fail.

You can't do just enough to stop the spread of the epidemic. You need to multiply that by a factor of 10 once or twice, while you still can. If it gets out of control, then there is nothing you CAN do.

Neither does mine. But, I run a tor relay so I'd be shocked if they haven't rooted every box I own. You don't need to send your data to Google's servers for the NSA to read it.

And hence why I said that if you're worried about the NSA you need about 10 more layers of tinfoil. If you think that just not having a Google account is enough to keep them at bay, you're not trying hard enough. I don't think it is realistic to keep my data out of the hands of the NSA, so I don't bother to try. I just wish that I could give up on doing backups and just be able to ask the NSA for a copy of my data if I lose it.

When did I advocate panic? In fact, I said the post you replied to that panic was useless.

What is necessary is treating the issue seriously, and not just like an outbreak of food poisoning.

Sure, it is a silly extrapolation. My point is just that we aren't taking this seriously enough.

Well, that would be true if we didn't have opportunities for new infections, and if we REALLY had a clear eye on everybody in contact with patient zero. As far as I understand it they were basically all told to stay home and are on the honor system. That really doesn't strike me as a responsible way to manage public health. I don't want to punish anybody, but this is a serious matter - by all means shower them with support, but at least post a guard to ensure nobody goes in or out of their homes.

Yeah, I'll buy that. The typical drug might have a 30% improvement in survivability vs a 20% improvement with a placebo. I suspect that when it comes to Ebola an effective treatment might have a 90% effective rate vs a 30% rate for placebo. The disease probably is lethal enough that you could be pretty sure about the results unless the treatment was only mildly effective.

I would initially greatly restrict travel (air, land, and sea) out of Africa and limit it to those involved in aid efforts. Those workers would be carefully observed. If a tight quarantine could be imposed at a level of granularity smaller than the entire continent, then I'd be willing to lift travel bans on the entire continent after they were effective for an incubation period with no sign of spread. However, it is hard to contain a disease area as large as the current outbreak, and the entirety of the continent provides geographic barriers to spread.

If somebody does develop Ebola then anybody they had contact with would be quarantined, with police enforcement (either monitoring devices as are commonly used in house arrest, or guards outside the door). Anybody infected would be isolated in dedicated facilities, with the healthcare workers quarantined. Of course, without an endless stream of flights out of Africa there would be few infections outside of Africa so these measures would be very limited.

First world nations should immediately fund rapid development and testing of promising treatments, offering bounties or fee-for-service models where necessary to get around concerns around marketability of the treatments. Nations really need an Ebola treatment in their bag of tricks even if this outbreak goes away before it is developed. There is no reason there can't be ten thousand greenhouses doing a crash course in wmapp production right now, even if it turns out to be a dud (which seems unlikely). Anybody with a biochem degree could be trained to produce it, and they aren't THAT uncommon. By all means use the drug domestically first, but with the travel ban there won't be much demand for that so you can actually give doctors without borders a good supply of the stuff. The fact is that having a pool of a million people with Ebola anywhere on the planet isn't a good thing for anybody, so even if everybody is completely selfish it is in their interest to fund getting that epidemic under control.

In a nutshell I'd treat this more like a war and less like a recession. The US has an insane 10% unemployment rate or something like that - there are plenty of bodies that could be given the necessary training to get ahead of this if we just got off of our collective rear ends and maybe did something with that nice GDP growth besides build private jets for CEOs. Since this could save the CEOs own hides, they probably won't complain too much about it.

They're going to have that no matter what OS the laptops run, at least for anything they are interested in actually capturing. Do you think that a PC running Windows or OSX is magically immune to NSA snooping?

What Google does with the data may be a differentiator, but if you're worried about the NSA you really need about 10 more layers of tinfoil. Of course, anybody wearing that much tinfoil will probably just be visited by ninjas in the middle of the night who have other ways of bypassing firewalls. :)

This is completely true, but it is very much a blame-the-victim mentality. I really don't care whose fault it is that mistakes get made. I think this just points to the need to really step up our game if we want to stay ahead of this. We're acting like the worst possible outcome of this situation is that people will stop going to the mall or getting on planes, and our policies are designed to try to prevent that from happening.

Yup, nothing to worry about. We've had all of about three people in the US with the disease so far with no more than one in any hospital at a time, and yet the workers still manage to get themselves infected. That is under fairly ideal conditions - these patients are actually in specialized isolation wards and they can dedicate personnel to them and generally isolate them from the rest of the hospital.

So, 3 sick patients leads to 1 sick healthcare worker. That isn't a particularly good ratio. If we had 100 people with Ebola then you'd expect 33 sick healthcare workers, and then you'd expect those to go on an infect another 11, then another 4, and then one more for good measure. If you're keeping count that is 50 healthcare workers in total, from treating 100 sick people.

Now, maybe we're just really unlucky or something, but I'd think that if the ERs started filling up with Ebola patients the amount of isolation would go down, not up.

The "nothing to worry about, it is just Ebola" crowd is beginning to sound a bit like the "the space shuttle is designed to not blow up more than once per 100k missions" crowd. All the hand-waving about how hard the disease is to transmit is in complete contrast that in first-world medical centers we already have two infected nurses.

This isn't AIDS. You CAN catch it from a handshake, let a lone a kiss.

Uh, Ebola spreads through contact, so by your logic it still wouldn't be time to be concerned if every last person on earth contracted the disease...

Panic of course is never helpful. However, extreme vigilance is. I think we're really underestimating the ability of this to get out of control.

No argument there, but you did manage to pick the western country with some of the worst free speech laws around.

Granted, it seems like the US has been trying hard to be more like the UK in this regard, but things like libel laws are FAR weaker in the US. You can be punished for what you say in the US, but the burden of proof is on the person making the accusation to demonstrate that what you said was both untrue, and caused harm.

It might be difficult in such a situation to do the test in a double-blind fashion, but you are correct that this can be done. Of course, without a placebo you can't rule out that none of the methods are particularly effective if they're comparable. After all, placebos are themselves effective compared to not treating somebody at all.