Ok. This isn’t my thing. I’m just trying to look into the economics and the math of it. But if Ebola really can have a 42 or even 21 day incubation period, that means it’s impossible to know if you have been exposed, and so every sniffle someone gets is suspect. I know people aren’t contagious until they show symptoms, but this long a period means you can’t really isolate people, and that unless you are perfectly healthy you must stay home. I guess we could temporarily criminalize public illness for a while. But it’s almost impossible to control. And with these mortality rates it’s not like 1918 even. It’s very hard to wipe out something with these characteristics. That outbreak had only a 20% mortality rate and killed about 6% of the world population. I don’t really know enough about transmission to have an opinion, but with the extreme level of care needed, that long a a gestation period, the mortality rate, it seems economically devastating just from having to fight it.
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-15 08:57:00 UTC
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