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gucci-on-fleek 3 hours ago [-]
(Originally posted as a reply to a dead comment)
While there was some controversy regarding how COVID spreads in the early days (droplets vs aerosol, how many virions you needed to be exposed to to become infected, whether asymptomatic transmission was possible, etc.), most of the details were fairly well understood within a year after the pandemic started. Plus, we were already aware that coronaviruses are capable of spreading via the air and causing mass outbreaks [0], so even at the very beginning I doubt that many experts would have claimed that it was impossible for COVID-19 to cause a pandemic.
However, Ebola has been around for 50 years now [1], so we have a pretty good idea how it works. And every source that I've read says that it spreads exclusively through direct fluid contact with someone who is symptomatic [2] [3] [4] [5], and so does every other virus in the same family [6], so it seems almost impossible for Ebola to cause the same type of worldwide outbreak that COVID-19 did.
(I'm not claiming that Ebola will never spread to North America/Europe, or that an outbreak won't spread to and kill lots of people in Africa, just that it should spread much slower than COVID-19 and that it should be much easier to prevent its transmission.)
No one worth listening to is claiming that there will be a COVID-style pandemic. The concern here is the very high mortality rate. Granted the transmission rate is low, but in countries where facilities and health-care workers are scarce this disease is still capable of being a real problem.
glenstein 2 hours ago [-]
Well they did just say it was in reply to a dead comment, so I suspect that was one person entertaining the possibility of widespread transmission, and there's already at least one more comment here if not two (depending how you interpret them) entertaining the possibility of mutation that leads to easier transmission.
Maybe the "worth listening to" caveat is intending to dismiss those, but I certainly don't think it's the case that nobody is suggesting it or that it's not worth pushing back against.
gucci-on-fleek 1 hours ago [-]
> No one worth listening to is claiming that there will be a COVID-style pandemic.
When I first posted this, all 4 top-level comments were dead, and half of them suggested that this Ebola outbreak would be similar to COVID-19. I agree that they're probably not worth listening to, but I still think that it's worth refuting them, since the media is generally not doing a great job explaining how Ebola is different from COVID-19.
> The concern here is the very high mortality rate.
Oh yeah, I definitely agree that this is concerning, but concerning in the sense that something absolutely horrible is happening in the world, and not in the sense that I could wake up tomorrow sick with Ebola (like some other comments were implying).
phyalow 1 hours ago [-]
The caveats to your comment are in my opinion as follows: Bundibugyo the current strain has not previously been responsible for material outbreaks, as such it has therefore received significantly less scientific attention.
Additionally Ebola (Zaire) has previously been shown to be potentially spread via aerosols. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00811, the CDC and associated institutions resolutely claim this is not possible, yet also insist on full respirator PPE. For any institution to claim we know much about this strain isnt true. An alarming fact to update ones prior is the current size of the outbreak and its rapid development compared to ALL previous outbreaks (yes conditions on the ground maybe confounding this), but the scientific approach would be to say, we simply do not have enough evidence to make any claims of significance.
I am quite worried about the potential for this situation in the DRC (a country of ~116m people, ~55% rural) to 1) not burn itself out, 2) act as a smouldering viral reservoir where occasional spillovers occur to the western hemisphere.
2) Is interesting politically for Western countries, because even if a mass pandemic DOES not occur (this is my base case), the pressure of containing a handful of regularly appearing and likely high profile Ebola cases by public health authorities will be acutely felt politically and socially. It is very possible some sorts of lockdowns are implemented. Yes vaccines are in development, yes rapid antigen testing is possible. But this is no Covid, 50%+ CFR is a totally different beast! I think this is potentially close to some sort of worst case scenario from a social and political perspective even if the public health impact IS limited.
Ah, I was not aware of this, so thanks for pointing that out. That does indeed look quite concerning, so let's hope that that won't apply to humans (although I'm struggling to think of a plausible biological reason for why it wouldn't).
> I am quite worried about the potential for this situation in the DRC (a country of ~116m people, ~55% rural) to 1) not burn itself out, 2) act as a smouldering viral reservoir where occasional spillovers occur to the western hemisphere.
I agree that this is bad in the sense that something absolutely horrific is happening to a lot of people; I was just trying to refute the point that we could also somehow wake up with Ebola a month from now.
mppm 2 hours ago [-]
Note to self and others who have read Richard Preston's "Hot Zone": The 1989 Reston (US) incident was NOT caused by a single-base mutation of Ebola, but by a distinct monkey virus. Preston seems to have made that up to dramatize events.
rjsw 3 hours ago [-]
Before COVID, I had thought that bushmeat [1] could be the route that spread Ebola to Europe, people smuggle it in their luggage.
Were it to spread to Europe, I imagine contact tracing and societal norms would result in a drastically lower r naught and basically make community spread a non-factor.
Europeans (at least European health authorities) would hopefully cut down on funeral activities like touching and kissing the bodies of Ebola victims, caring for relatives at home without PPE and sanitation, etc.
African countries face challenges with fighting Ebola, but they sure do make things even harder for themselves with certain practices that are pretty rough even through 19th century germ theory lens.
Arodex 1 hours ago [-]
>Were it to spread to Europe, I imagine contact tracing and societal norms would result in a drastically lower r naught and basically make community spread a non-factor.
It depends where in Europe. COVID created or revealed a crazy underbelly in a significant part of the population. And I don't see hospitals keeping up well with an influx of patients requiring very strict isolation protocols against any symptom of bleeding (and there are more people having abnormal bleeding than one imagines, especially with the aging of the population. Now imagine every one of them is a maximum level alarm).
And despite the idea that public health is weak in Africa, African doctors and nurses are better trained and efficient against epidemics that their European counterparts.
justin66 2 hours ago [-]
> people smuggle it in their luggage
Really?
alex43578 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah. There's a reason why customs is so strict about the sloppy importation of food: it's host to diseases and pests, capable of causing ridiculous damage because someone has to have that "taste of home".
justin66 36 seconds ago [-]
[delayed]
api 3 hours ago [-]
True right now, but what happens if it mutates?
A few thousand is nowhere close to pandemic but it's enough to give the virus many opportunities to evolve against its new environment.
On the plus side, most viruses become less deadly as they adapt to their host. COVID luckily did this, it seems. If Ebola does this it'll become like the flu, but we don't want yet another flu-level disease circulating.
gucci-on-fleek 42 minutes ago [-]
> True right now, but what happens if it mutates?
There are more than a dozen viruses in the same family as Ebola, each of which have various strains, and none of them have airborne spread. Also, this family has been around for over 1k years [0], and any mutation allowing for airborne spread would be heavily selected for, which suggests that it's probably not "easy" (in the sense that it would only require a very small number of mutations) for the virus to acquire this trait.
That being said, evolution is messy and probabilistic, so it's certainly possible for this to happen (especially considering the high AIDS prevalence in Africa, which increases the risk of recombination), but the odds of this are so low that I wouldn't worry about it. Another novel coronavirus or influenza strain would probably be my biggest worry.
There's a genetic continent between hemorrhagic fever and coronavirus, and I'd be far more worried about something like MERS or another already-respiratory virus breaking out than Ebola.
Arodex 2 hours ago [-]
Ebola is known for 50 years, and yet we still discover new facts about it, thanks to PCR and genetic analysis.
It was only in 2021 that we discovered that ebola can remain dormant for years in former patients and restart infecting:
The last update finally had a growth rate confidence interval straggling 0, meaning the peak seems to be within reach: "The latest growth rate is estimated to be 30% -0.005–0.008"
The documentary on the last outbreak remain relevant to this day, the causes are still local hygiene practices, and this will not be solved by dropping in medical teams and hospitals and the WHO holding conferences and getting more money.
What solved this last time was the local population learning the importance of washing ones hands
I get the feeling the reason this is out of control is the political climate, at one point in time, a good US president or EU council would've sent aid, doctors, equipment, etc to help tackle this, now everyone is so broke (allegedly) and angry that it's just political suicide to say you're sending money to help "foreigners" in Africa.
The face of rich people and philanthropy has changed too. The billionaires (and nearly trillionaires?) don't need to pretend to care anymore. They have a moat right now where it's fine to be hoarding all the money while thousands die from something which we could stop if the resources and political clout was available to help.
China was entering into this space but seems not to be helping now either, I guess because the west isn't helping, they don't need to pretend anymore that they're the good guys.
Obviously, it's the right thing to do is help, even if just for selfish reasons, ie we don't want this thing in other countries, but you cannot do that anymore because it's just political suicide to do so.
fliglr 39 minutes ago [-]
How many decades have we been helping Africa for, and for what?
inference-god 23 minutes ago [-]
When Ebola is eating your face you will find out for what.
Africa might be the least fortunate people but you don't get a pass for ignoring that and not helping, we're all in this together, like it or not.
hn_submit 2 hours ago [-]
I chide the people in Africa for not following up on best health practices as far as Ebola victims are concerned. It seems there's a ritualistic need for people in Africa to touch and kiss the deceased before they're buried. This is a bad idea as far as Ebola is concerned. There've even been cases where family members attacked UN hospitals to remove their loved ones remains, perpetuating the spread of the disease.
A couple hundred years ago they didn't know any better so you could forgive them. But these days we do know better and to still insist on rituals that lead to the spreading of Ebola is just plain dumb.
As far as I'm concerned there should be stronger travel restrictions for people from Africa, especially the ones near the Ebola outbreak.
ds_opseeker 14 minutes ago [-]
> But these days we do know better and to still insist on rituals that lead to the spreading ...
Thus explaining why RFK has his current position.
contubernio 2 hours ago [-]
People on the street, so to speak, don't know better even in advanced nations with strong educational systems. Look how much rejection of vaccination there is in spite of "knowing better". In many African nations there is very reasonable suspicion of European authorities - as there is a long history of abuse and degradation that has moreover been weaponized politically kn the post colonial era. The solution is trustworthy and pedagogical people on the ground doing a lot of hard work and that requires lots of institutional support.
Arodex 2 hours ago [-]
>I chide the people in Africa for not following up on best health practices as far as Ebola victims are concerned
God, how can you say that with a straight face after the "ritualistic" response people in the West had during COVID? Fighting against wearing masks, having their mind break because they couldn't go drink in bars, going crazy for snake oil solutions and destroying public health care.
We have had in almost every western country politicians and executives asking to lift any restrictions "because we all die one day anyway, we shouldn't be afraid, get back to work".
mytailorisrich 26 minutes ago [-]
I think that what happened with Covid was the big gap between the very strict measures enacted and the perceived risk.
When people think "it's just the flu" it's easy to become defiant.
On the other hand, Ebola has a known fatality rate of 50%+ and so refusing to follow best practices is plain suicidal.
anonymars 31 minutes ago [-]
Plus vaccines now
iberator 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
andrewstuart 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
marcyb5st 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah, and to avoid inconveniencing airlines and their profits we should keep flying to those destinations like back then.
throwawayqqq11 4 hours ago [-]
This is a new strain without a vaccine and more people infected means higher risk of further mutation. When this thing gets more infectious and progresses slower ... if i were the WHO, id throw everything i got at this.
tw1984 5 hours ago [-]
> stayed in China
funded by the US government.
skc 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
gspr 4 hours ago [-]
> Very lazy headline. Which "Congo"?
This is a ridiculous gripe. If you don't want to actually read, you can just assume the union of both possibilities, and absolutely nothing about the takeaway here changes unless you're literally in one of the Congos or the immediate surroundings, in which case you probabably know enough about the situation at hand to make the question moot.
Some people.
psychoslave 5 hours ago [-]
Just open the page, it’s stating DRC right into the article title.
While there was some controversy regarding how COVID spreads in the early days (droplets vs aerosol, how many virions you needed to be exposed to to become infected, whether asymptomatic transmission was possible, etc.), most of the details were fairly well understood within a year after the pandemic started. Plus, we were already aware that coronaviruses are capable of spreading via the air and causing mass outbreaks [0], so even at the very beginning I doubt that many experts would have claimed that it was impossible for COVID-19 to cause a pandemic.
However, Ebola has been around for 50 years now [1], so we have a pretty good idea how it works. And every source that I've read says that it spreads exclusively through direct fluid contact with someone who is symptomatic [2] [3] [4] [5], and so does every other virus in the same family [6], so it seems almost impossible for Ebola to cause the same type of worldwide outbreak that COVID-19 did.
(I'm not claiming that Ebola will never spread to North America/Europe, or that an outbreak won't spread to and kill lots of people in Africa, just that it should spread much slower than COVID-19 and that it should be much easier to prevent its transmission.)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002%E2%80%932004_SARS_outbrea...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola#History
[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/ebola/causes/index.html#heading-xkphh2xy...
[3]: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ebola-disea...
[4]: https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2026/05/18/what-is-ebola-and-how-d...
[5]: https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/ebo...
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filoviridae
Maybe the "worth listening to" caveat is intending to dismiss those, but I certainly don't think it's the case that nobody is suggesting it or that it's not worth pushing back against.
When I first posted this, all 4 top-level comments were dead, and half of them suggested that this Ebola outbreak would be similar to COVID-19. I agree that they're probably not worth listening to, but I still think that it's worth refuting them, since the media is generally not doing a great job explaining how Ebola is different from COVID-19.
> The concern here is the very high mortality rate.
Oh yeah, I definitely agree that this is concerning, but concerning in the sense that something absolutely horrible is happening in the world, and not in the sense that I could wake up tomorrow sick with Ebola (like some other comments were implying).
Additionally Ebola (Zaire) has previously been shown to be potentially spread via aerosols. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00811, the CDC and associated institutions resolutely claim this is not possible, yet also insist on full respirator PPE. For any institution to claim we know much about this strain isnt true. An alarming fact to update ones prior is the current size of the outbreak and its rapid development compared to ALL previous outbreaks (yes conditions on the ground maybe confounding this), but the scientific approach would be to say, we simply do not have enough evidence to make any claims of significance.
I am quite worried about the potential for this situation in the DRC (a country of ~116m people, ~55% rural) to 1) not burn itself out, 2) act as a smouldering viral reservoir where occasional spillovers occur to the western hemisphere.
2) Is interesting politically for Western countries, because even if a mass pandemic DOES not occur (this is my base case), the pressure of containing a handful of regularly appearing and likely high profile Ebola cases by public health authorities will be acutely felt politically and socially. It is very possible some sorts of lockdowns are implemented. Yes vaccines are in development, yes rapid antigen testing is possible. But this is no Covid, 50%+ CFR is a totally different beast! I think this is potentially close to some sort of worst case scenario from a social and political perspective even if the public health impact IS limited.
Ah, I was not aware of this, so thanks for pointing that out. That does indeed look quite concerning, so let's hope that that won't apply to humans (although I'm struggling to think of a plausible biological reason for why it wouldn't).
> I am quite worried about the potential for this situation in the DRC (a country of ~116m people, ~55% rural) to 1) not burn itself out, 2) act as a smouldering viral reservoir where occasional spillovers occur to the western hemisphere.
I agree that this is bad in the sense that something absolutely horrific is happening to a lot of people; I was just trying to refute the point that we could also somehow wake up with Ebola a month from now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushmeat
Europeans (at least European health authorities) would hopefully cut down on funeral activities like touching and kissing the bodies of Ebola victims, caring for relatives at home without PPE and sanitation, etc.
African countries face challenges with fighting Ebola, but they sure do make things even harder for themselves with certain practices that are pretty rough even through 19th century germ theory lens.
It depends where in Europe. COVID created or revealed a crazy underbelly in a significant part of the population. And I don't see hospitals keeping up well with an influx of patients requiring very strict isolation protocols against any symptom of bleeding (and there are more people having abnormal bleeding than one imagines, especially with the aging of the population. Now imagine every one of them is a maximum level alarm).
And despite the idea that public health is weak in Africa, African doctors and nurses are better trained and efficient against epidemics that their European counterparts.
Really?
A few thousand is nowhere close to pandemic but it's enough to give the virus many opportunities to evolve against its new environment.
On the plus side, most viruses become less deadly as they adapt to their host. COVID luckily did this, it seems. If Ebola does this it'll become like the flu, but we don't want yet another flu-level disease circulating.
There are more than a dozen viruses in the same family as Ebola, each of which have various strains, and none of them have airborne spread. Also, this family has been around for over 1k years [0], and any mutation allowing for airborne spread would be heavily selected for, which suggests that it's probably not "easy" (in the sense that it would only require a very small number of mutations) for the virus to acquire this trait.
That being said, evolution is messy and probabilistic, so it's certainly possible for this to happen (especially considering the high AIDS prevalence in Africa, which increases the risk of recombination), but the odds of this are so low that I wouldn't worry about it. Another novel coronavirus or influenza strain would probably be my biggest worry.
[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9151191/
It was only in 2021 that we discovered that ebola can remain dormant for years in former patients and restart infecting:
https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/w3ct1yvq
The last update finally had a growth rate confidence interval straggling 0, meaning the peak seems to be within reach: "The latest growth rate is estimated to be 30% -0.005–0.008"
There's a nice figure showing Rt over time: https://epiforecasts.io/BVDOutbreakSize/stable/analysis#Repr...
What solved this last time was the local population learning the importance of washing ones hands
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG1aY5OOR2o
The face of rich people and philanthropy has changed too. The billionaires (and nearly trillionaires?) don't need to pretend to care anymore. They have a moat right now where it's fine to be hoarding all the money while thousands die from something which we could stop if the resources and political clout was available to help.
China was entering into this space but seems not to be helping now either, I guess because the west isn't helping, they don't need to pretend anymore that they're the good guys.
Obviously, it's the right thing to do is help, even if just for selfish reasons, ie we don't want this thing in other countries, but you cannot do that anymore because it's just political suicide to do so.
Africa might be the least fortunate people but you don't get a pass for ignoring that and not helping, we're all in this together, like it or not.
A couple hundred years ago they didn't know any better so you could forgive them. But these days we do know better and to still insist on rituals that lead to the spreading of Ebola is just plain dumb.
As far as I'm concerned there should be stronger travel restrictions for people from Africa, especially the ones near the Ebola outbreak.
Thus explaining why RFK has his current position.
God, how can you say that with a straight face after the "ritualistic" response people in the West had during COVID? Fighting against wearing masks, having their mind break because they couldn't go drink in bars, going crazy for snake oil solutions and destroying public health care.
We have had in almost every western country politicians and executives asking to lift any restrictions "because we all die one day anyway, we shouldn't be afraid, get back to work".
When people think "it's just the flu" it's easy to become defiant.
On the other hand, Ebola has a known fatality rate of 50%+ and so refusing to follow best practices is plain suicidal.
funded by the US government.
This is a ridiculous gripe. If you don't want to actually read, you can just assume the union of both possibilities, and absolutely nothing about the takeaway here changes unless you're literally in one of the Congos or the immediate surroundings, in which case you probabably know enough about the situation at hand to make the question moot.
Some people.