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...
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.
There are, of course, some exceptions (long incubation periods where you can shed virus but are totally asymptomatic) but those are rare and usually self limiting in some other factor. Smallpox was really the worst possible case and we have thankfully eliminated it.
Big deadly pandemics (black plague level) are usually bacteria.
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.
It was only in 2021 that we discovered that ebola can remain dormant for years in former patients and restart infecting:
1. Mass movement of classrooms/education to the outdoors in climates where this was possible, despite the outdoors being an excellent way to reduce exposure to an airborne pathogen.
2. Mass campaigns to deploy air purification devices/filtration and modernize existing HVAC. Air quality is often garbage anyway indoors because of bad hygiene from people and natural pollutants. Slapping an air filter to a box fan is an extremely cheap and effective (if loud) solution!!!! We had no excuses for not having government money spent here. It'd also make these stupid wildfires much easier for most to deal with, and as a bonus reduce every respitory related negative externality there is.
3. Educating people that something as simple as cracking/opening your windows while driving is effective at circulating air such that you can massively reduce your chance of transmitting COVID.
But what did we get instead? Masking mandates - leading to a massive amount of physical pollution in landfills, political radicalization against left-wing movements, a whole lot of annoyed glasses wearers, etc. Lots of cloth masks which ultimately worked poorly and lead to economic boom-bust cycles in a core medical commodity in an already fucked supply chain. Lots of fake N-95s, leading to worse QC across the industry which still plagues it today.
We also got insane "6 feet" requirements that did nothing to rescue people from extremely poorly ventilated/purified environments which made mass spread of the virus in places like schools inevitable.
I will never forgive the public for how stupid they are when it comes to anything involving air quality. We have learned basically nothing except about mRNA (which is awesome) and about how much we hated democracy from the stupid boomer flu.
P.S: Bonus, the fact that Americans don't wash their assholes after using the bathroom (no bidet culture like in Asia) means that we unironically are spreading it all anyway by being around others indoors:
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/04/feces-covid-1...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7464151/
America should have had a mass campaign to put bidets on every toilet nation wide in the 50s. Let's do it now.
What solved this last time was the local population learning the importance of washing ones hands
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...
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.
I wish that public leaders realised just how much their personal moral fibre determines what people in general will and won't tolerate. The public trust they cheerfully destroy in minutes takes decades to rebuild, and I'm genuinely worried that if there's a pandemic with this still in the majority of people's memory they will go 'so you're going to put us under house arrest and have massive parties again? Why should we listen to you?' and it'll be a very difficult question to answer.
Now, again Ebola is very seriously deadly so it does not make sense to compare people refusing to follow Covid restrictions then to people refusing to follow Ebola best practices now.
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.
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.