This is the WHO announcement: https://www.who.int/news/item/17-05-2026-epidemic-of-ebola-d...

And yes, this is a big deal. Public health emergencies of international concern are a short list consisting of, in their entirety: swine flu ('09 to '10), polio ('14 on), ebola ('13 to '16), Zika ('16), ebola ('19 to '20), Covid ('20 to '23), monkeypox ('22 to '25) and now this [1]. It's one step down from a pandemic emergency (which, to be clear, has not been declared).

(Helpful explainer: https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2....)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_health_emergency_of_int...

> Epstien class going hard this round!

Huh?

The cynic in me sees this kind of outbreak as exactly the intention of the current US administration in gutting CDC funding and leaving the WHO.

It's misanthropic behavior, fueled by their big bunch of various essentialist inferiority/superiority complexes.

It's just a continuation of their anti-science policy which their voters support.

No it's not a big deal. Ebola is deadly if you catch it but it is not very contagious at all. You need to be in contact with someone's fluids basically. It can't go very far.

If it was that simple Ebola wouldn’t ever spread and nobody would bother trying to contain it. Instead it’s relatively easy to contain but still requires active effort.

It's that simple... in first world countries. Lacks in infrastructure and educatin make it harder

COVID spread didn’t break down into first world vs third world countries because first world countries infrastructure isn’t built with pandemics in mind.

Instead a great deal of modern infrastructure like subway systems makes things more difficult not less.

I’m not an epidemiologist, but Ebola isn’t airborne like COVID is, so that isn’t a comparison that can be made.

infrastructure density matters, but it doesn’t affect both the same way.

This gets into the question of definitions vs edge cases.

Ebola like many viruses can be contagious without direct touching.

It’s not well adapted to airborne transmission, but it’s very good at causing people to spread bodily fluids all over the place. So a very sick individual passing through a subway seeking medical treatment could infect a large number of people.

Ebola can mutate and this would no longer be true

There are a million viruses that can mutate. That's not really an argument for anything.

There aren't million of viruses that are as deadly as ebola

But they can mutate to be as deadly as Ebola.

Pigs can grow wings too. Is there a particular small set of mutations that you're referring to that we're actually worried about, or just wildly speculating of what could happen in a one-in-a-quadrillion event?

If pigs reproduced and mutated as rapidly as viruses then yeah, we would probably need to plan around the eventuality that they would develop wings and escape their pens.

Not answering the question. Is there some small gene change that we're specifically worried about here or was GP wildly speculating?

> reproduced and mutated as rapidly as viruses

HIV spreads in similar ways afaik (some fluids, I don't know the details of Ebola but it's not respiratory), yet that hasn't gone airborne in decades. I'm well aware that pigs don't get a million offspring each, but it doesn't seem like a common event for viruses to completely change their mechanism overnight either. Hence the quadrillion odds I mentioned, I was indeed referencing that they mutate so much, and yet...

> Is there some small gene change that we're specifically worried about here

Yes. A single gene change allows for airborne Ebola transmission. This gene change has occurred in the Reston strain, which luckily does not cause symptoms in humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reston_virus

Where does that article say Reston (or a mutant strain of Reston) is airborne?

> Ebola is deadly if you catch it but it is not very contagious at all

This isn't straight Ebolavirus (Zaire), but this thing [1]. We don't have enough data yet to confirm it spreads like Ebola among humans.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundibugyo_ebolavirus

Fine, but "we don't know" != "it's a big deal". All I see here is wild speculation.

But also "we don't know"! = "it's NOT a big deal".

I'm OK with some caution.

Yeah I agree with you here…

Haven’t we been burnt by being not cautious enough when COVID hit? Initially most scientists said “we don’t know if it’s airborne” or they said “there are no signs that it’s airborne” and the media turned it into “nothing flying fear” - and a few weeks later it was suddenly airborne.

“We don’t know” is a normal state in science and policies and personal behavior can take unknowns into consideration.

The only actually serious one on that list is Covid, and the title and the nyt are lying, they declared an international emergency, not a global one, there is no chance this spreads outside of sub-saharan Africa.

>The only actually serious one on that list

Based on what? The final body count?

This isn't a weather forecast, people and ressources flew towards making sure these emergencies didn't spiral into global pandemics.

You are falling face first into the preparedness paradox.

The flu kills 300-500k every year, and did not make the list, while absolute bullshit like Zika and Monkey pox did.

Flu kills mostly babies and elders, ebola kills at any age. Hence the logistical and cultural and societal impact are nothing alike.

Death by infected count, and level of infectious ess both matter. Flue kills more, but its also a lower death per infected count. This is why comparing COVID to flu was a statistic only pursued by those with a wilful misunderstanding.

How much effort was thrown at each one in dollars or hours? Can you fill in that context?

> only actually serious one on that list is Covid

That's the only one on the list that turned into a pandemic emergency.

> they declared an international emergency, not a global one

...you're mincing words in a silly way.

> there is no chance this spreads outside of sub-saharan Africa

Not what the public-health experts are saying! We currently don't actually know where it's gone. Given multi-week incubation periods, we won't know for a couple weeks where it is right now.

Keep in mind that eastern DRC and South Sudan are host to multiple internationalised conflicts right now. There are easy ways this could spread to the Gulf, Russia, America or Asia through troops and trade.

Ebola will never create an epidemic anywhere with a working health care system. And it's not mincing words, a few countries on a single continent is not global in any form, the WHO never said global, that's just something the nyt made up.

What constitutes a working health system? I would say the definition varies wildly.

In this case, it'd be one that says "if you're going to allow people from those countries to enter your country make sure they're quarantined until clear" without being stopped by "it so nazi racist"

> It's one step down from a pandemic emergency (which, to be clear, has not been declared).

Well, no wonder. Ot was introduced only in June 2024.

Nobody is going to take you seriously if you have shown how greed and corruption led to your mistake in COVID - sponsored by China

Many of the people worrying about this should stop worrying.

The average commentator on this website, if he or she dies this year, will be more likely to die in a motor vehicle accident or due to the complications of cardiovascular disease, or due to cancer.

If you’re going to spend time worrying, worry about all those things instead. When it comes to infectious diseases, the flu is more likely to kill the people here than hantavirus or Ebola. Make sure to get your flu vaccines.

You're right that this shouldn't cause worry. But it should command attention. At least as much as that stupid hantavirus nothingburger did.

This misses the point. The individual health risk might be low, the societal response to the risk might severely impact your life regardless of your personal risk exposure.

But I do worry a bit about dying in a car accident, it's why I wear my seatbelt, drive safe, try to drive defensively.

Adding both those risks together still is a higher risk than before...

So just to be clear: wearing your seatbelt will increase your chances of death-by-falling-coconut. Or Ebola. Take your pick.

The risk of dying is 100% for everyone alive.

But the risk of dying by having your entire body break down in uncontrollable bleeding is substantially less than 100%, and I for one would like to keep it that way.

I read elsewhere that this strain is less deadly than previous strains. I'm no epidemiologist but being less deadly could allow it to spread further, which is obviously concerning.

Also, the article says surveillance picked up the spread late. I wonder if the US's pulling back from the WHO and other international functions had anything to do with this, it used to make up a big chunk of its resources and staff.

It's been picked up late because it's from Goma, a region in Congo currently operated by the March 23 Movement a "rebel" group against the current Congo's government.

To expand on this, it's universally accepted that they're a group backed by Rwanda, and are there for the resources that the DRC has, which are being trafficked to Rwanda for export.

> and are there for the resources that the DRC has

Oh dear. This has found its way on to HN. Since finding resources that clearly explain the situation is difficult from the west and difficult in english, the situation is many times more complicated. It's true that some of the resources that flow out of the eastern DRC flow out through Rwanda. It's true that M23 is clearly backed by Rwandan people and money. And for the record, I do not support any of the involved groups or states, but I do speak a couple of the many involved languages, and I did marry into the region, and I have spent years in north kivu in both the congo and in rwanda, southern Uganda, and a little in Burundi, and a little in Tanzania, and I have a large social network across the region.

Let us start with the surface level. M23 is just a puppet of Rwanda for regional imperialism, right? But the profits of the mines in the east Congo have never gone to the east Congo: the DRC has been essentially refusing to build infrastructure, or even govern, the east Congo since Zaire, since the first DRC, since the Belgian Congo, since the Congo Free State. And it's not easy, either: trying to govern Goma from Kinshasa is like trying to govern Berlin from Lisbon, but without developed roads or trains, through dense forest and up a river with many cliffs and rapids that make using it... actually governing the eastern Congo from Kinshasa is absurd. It's purely through the insistence of the west that this actually be the case.

Second, the DRC has one of the worst militaries (the FARDC) in the world. Probably easily the worst compared to the insane wealth it sits on top of. It's not a mistake: there has, essentially, never been a peaceful transfer of power in the country's history since colonization. This has been exacerbated by the literally hundreds of local militias that pepper the north and east of the country, actively armed by the government. This creates a situation of lawlessness and violence seen in few other places on earth: for instance, it has the highest rate of sexual violence of any place on earth, one of the highest rates of malnutrition, one of the lowest literacy rates, one of the lowest life expectancies. So: the country invests in collecting money from the mines as policed by its own military, invests in local militias to counter the military, and refuses to actually govern the area to enforce its own laws, build schools or hospitals, educate its populace, develop some of the most fertile ground on earth, let alone actually build supply chains around the mines it produces. By all reason it should be one of the wealthiest countries on earth, and yet it is not.

Third, the ethnic conflict of abanyarwanda never vanished. Not only does the FDLR (the remnants of the interahamwe) survive and thrive in the Congo after having fled their blatant attempt to exterminate the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994, it is actively armed and works with the FARDC. Today you can go onto TikTok and find members of the FDLR who were born in the Congo talk about how much they hate the Tutsi and want to exterminate them once and for all. For the last six decades, the radios of northern and eastern Congo are filled with rhetoric about the Hema/Tutsi/Nilotic conspiracy to dominate the Bantu (Hutu/Lendu). Think the anti-semitic rhetoric we're all familiar with, but amplified by a conflation with hatred of the bourgeois, all driven from a city 1500 kilometers away. For a region that has one of the lowest literacy rates on earth, this means that violence has simply not stopped during this time. And yes, even today, abanyamulenge are subjected to concerted, state-driven, mass violence—because the locals think that Rwanda, the hand of Hema imperialism, has been on a centuries-long campaign to drive the Congolese from the region and take it out on the highland herders. The Hutu have, of course, also been subjected to mass violence for decades—including multiple obvious and internationally recognized genocides—but anti-hutu rhetoric is certainly not spread by Rwanda, or (by all indications available in the languages I can read) M23, or any of the AFC.

Why does the DRC actively perpetuate this ethnic conflict? Because it is a barely functional state, and the rulers are all deeply corrupt, and much of this money flows from the mines in the east, and it is easier to blame ethnic conspiracies than it is to build roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, electrical infrastructure, and in short develop anything. To admit the reality in naked terms—a necessary step to heal—would immediately start a civil war across the entire country, which is again barely tied together with twine to begin with. Both Kabila Sr (...an enormously interesting man) and his son clearly attempted to govern in an idealistic sense... but both eventually turned back to relying on ethnic tensions to explain the poor governance, particularly outside of but also in Kinshasa itself (...confusingly, but racism has rarely been very rational)

And of course, the mines are of deep international interest. Specifically, Canada, the US, China, and the UAE (I'm sure others too) all have their grubby mitts in the region developing only the infrastructure solely necessary to extract minerals, raping and enslaving the local populace, and paying off all the local governments to keep this ruse going. The governments of Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, and the DRC are each complicit in this obvious crime against humanity, each interested in their cut of the dollars that flow outward.

Now, of course, Trump managed to stick his dick in the region, and Erik Prince with his blackwater thugs are there ensuring that the terror of drone striking civilians and villages is well understood by the people of the eastern Congo. The DRC is now using US and UAE funds to build a new paramilitary to police its mines. The result will almost 100% certainly be a larger civil war in the east in the best case scenario, and in the worst case scenario complete regional total war with millions dead. Tshisekedi has obliquely telegraphed a desire to seize territory and/or topple the states of Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi—in part because he realizes his life depends on the region not successfully ousting him. (Though—Burundi is now acting as a sort of mercenary force for the Congo, which is again unwilling to bankroll its own military, but I would not expect this relationship to last for very long.)

And do I support M23, the AFC? No. Absolutely not. But there is no solution for the region short of peace, and there is so many arms and so little infrastructure and so little centralized authority this is simply not possible. At the very least, it needs 100x the international attention and capital inflow that it is getting, and I see about as much chance of that as a wounded calf being saved from a pack of ravening wolves in the middle of nowhere. So is it surprising that Rwanda (or Uganda, or Burundi) has their troops in the DRC? No, not at all—it is an enormous, enormous existential risk to not do that. The east Congo makes the balkan powder keg look wet.

I'm sorry to have typed so much, but it is infuriating to watch my beloved north kivu being written off by one interest or the other as a simple conflict. No, there is nothing simple about the conflict, it is an enormous tragedy, and it was international intervention that created this problem with the Congo crisis—all to preserve precious mineral extraction supply chains. By all rational understanding I have, the east Congo should have some degree of self determination rather than being raped and enslaved by Kinshasa, Uganda, Rwanda, the US, Canada, the UAE, and China—and there is simply zero path to that. Paradoxically, the attention M23 is bringing the region may have resulted in more efforts to govern.

And in the case of Ebola, nobody gives a fuck. Hah. LMAO, even. There is simply zero chance that something as delicate as disease management will visit the region before the governance question is answered. If this concerns you, become a praying person.

The resource is deeply outdated, and it has its biases and blind spots and points of frustration where the journalist who wrote it sees things from a very western perspective and/or was manipulated by the person he was interviewing or he is too skeptical to see what is in front of his face, but from the west if you only know English, I recommend the book Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason Stearns.

I'm afraid I have mildly butchered the topic, but there is no easy way to approach the utter shallowness of which this will be seen from the west.

Thank you very much for this well structured comment despite your clearly visible emotional turmoil speaking if the region. It matches what a friend of ours tells about her relatives that still live there in parts. The diaspora of people from the DRC is surprising huge in Europe - a fact I was not aware of really.

Do you have a better source if I speak fluent French by any chance?

Thanks for the recap

I would also be interested, native French speaker

Thank you for the insightful summary!

Found this interesting tidbit on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_Rwanda: > Although these groups were distinct and stratified in relation to one another, the boundary between Tutsi and Hutu was somewhat open to social mobility. The Tutsi elite were defined by their exclusive ownership of land and cattle. Hutus, however, though disenfranchised socially and politically, could shed Hutuness, or kwihutura, by accumulating wealth, and thereby rising through the social hierarchy to the status of Tutsi.

Thank you for the detailed comment, but I'm a bit confused.

You start like you're disagreeing with me, but in the end it seems to me you're just providing some (very much needed) context around the whole quagmire.

The Eastern DRC has been a mess since forever, and nobody's actions seem to be towards improving the situation. But ultimately, M23 control parts of it, probably couldn't care less about public health, and they're why Rwanda is suddenly a major resource exporter for things it doesn't have. Nobody is saying it's simple, but that's the headline.

Thank you for the pointers to all those resources!

I spent my childhood in the Kasaï-Oriental - my parents were aid workers - and though I lived through some of the key periods of the country (Kabila Sr's rise and assassination) I was young and had no idea of the more general goings-on beyond our town. I've been trying to learn more about the period and I imagine these will be very helpful.

I wonder if my French is still good enough for Les guerres à l'est de la RD Congo...

GDP per capita, $1,884. I don't think poverty is a coincidence. Helping them become wealthy is a global health priority.

That would set a terrible precedent for all other areas suffering from poverty.

is this satire

> read elsewhere that this strain is less deadly than previous strains

"Case fatality rates in the past two [Bundibugyo virus disease] outbreaks, reported in Uganda and in DRC in 2007 and 2012, have ranged from approximately 30% to 50%" [1]. Given "as of 15 May, a total of 246 suspected cases and 80 deaths" were reported, the current disease's 33% fatality rate is in the historic range.

[1] https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2...

Lower fatality rate (and longer gestation times) are things that make a disease spread farther (not necessarily faster -but we take care of that, with international travel).

The OG Ebola had almost 100% fatality rate, and a short gestation time (I think only a few days). It didn't spread too far. The one that killed a few thousand people, though, had about a 50% fatality rate, and I think its gestation period was a bit over a week (these are the products of a faulty memory, but quoting LLM output isn't considered polite, hereabouts, and, for all we know, they could hallucinate the stats, anyway). Also, a hemorrhagic fever pretty much chews up your organs, so it's likely to drive bad health outcomes, for the rest of our lives, even if we survive.

HIV/AIDS has (the meds just keep it at bay) a 100% fatality rate, but a very long gestation period.

COVID, I believe, had about a 1% rate, in the OG variant, and that brought the world to a standstill. I think Spanish Flu (another world standstill), had about 2.5%, and a relatively short gestation period, but it was also quite communicable.

> COVID, I believe, had about a 1% rate, in the OG variant, and that brought the world to a standstill.

The claims that caused lockdowns were 3-10% death rate.

The world was brought to a standstill primarily due to massive fearmongering. The earliest high rates came from three things: Conflation of "infection" and "case", rationing of tests to people doctors were already pretty sure had been exposed (suppressing the denominator and inflating the rate), and biased samples (for example the Diamond Princess cruise ship was weighted towards the most susceptible population and maxed out 1.2% a month after the lockdowns had begun).

I try to keep an open mind, and this is something that you might legitimately convince me of. However:

1. A comment on this forum is not really the place to convince people of such a bold claim. It deserves at least an article/blog post, and maybe even a short book.

2. There is a large jump between the claims [the initial fatality estimate was high] and [the world was brought to a standstill due to fearmongering]. This gap is perhaps something you could address in a longer blog post

This is exactly the kind of topic that I’d love to see gwern or slatestarcodex tackle. There might be some truth to your story, but it’s a complex topic and needs a _ton_ of discussion

I used to have an open mind about this myself, until I saw the other side of healthcare.

Even with the lockdowns, Covid nearly overwhelmed the healthcare system in America. It led to a massive nursing shortage as nurses quit. The system could not have handled more cases appearing faster.

Lockdowns were not after very very early numbers ever based on lies or fearmongering. The fatality rate we observed in the developed world was based on bad cases being able to receive prompt treatment.

Had it expanded faster it risked not only infecting a larger portion of the population pre-vaccination but also seeing more people who would have been salvageable with treatment dying innecessarily.

Pretending we could have experienced the death rate we did in our experience whilst also adopting a different strategy is farcical reasoning.

Also, in my country, more hospitalizations would be quite severe, as the hospitals are already short staffed. There were also not enough masks for everyone to mitigate it.

I think a lot of anti-lock down claims are too simplistic. There were too many unknowns, and there's little consensus about the ideal outcomes.

(I'm a bit biased: I was able to do remote work and move to my parents house, which is quite spacious and near the woods, so I could go outside a bit - so it didn't affect my finances or mental health too much)

I was wondering about that with the hantavirus, whereby if it's got a higher fatality rate then it's less likely to be easily transmitted.

Is that like a general rule, or pure bunk? (I'd probably assume the answer 'depends').

From COVID-era discussions (when virologists were briefly the stars of every talk show) I remember one explaining that it was less about fatality rates per se and more about the length of time you could carry the virus around and be nearly asymptomatic while still able to infect others.

I understand the jury is still out on whether a virus can be considered "alive" but, like us, it is capable of replicating itself and mutating. In that sense, it benefits from the same evolution strategies as more complex beings: a strain that gets its host very sick very quickly gets a lower chance to spread to a new host and multiply.

This creates an evolutionary advantage for strains of that virus that are less aggressive or at least develop the worst symptoms more slowly and more covertly.

Yeah. HIV is a good example of this. Without treatment, it is deadly pretty much 100% of the time. However, it takes a long time after the shut down of the immune system before a systematic infection takes over and kills you.

That allowed for a deadly disease that's somewhat hard to spread (mostly just through sex) to ultimately go on a rampage.

I never thought about this.

So without concern for the humans with HIV* there an argument to be made that treating symptoms without curing made it spread more?

*obviously, this is just hypothetical. It’s important to care about the life of those with HIV. No banish them all to something like a leper-colony. Although it explains the logic for those at the time they existed better than a religious one did.

HIV specifically targets the immune system. There's no way to just treat the symptoms.

The treatments we have now also decrease the risk of spread significantly.

It's a bit like the chickenpox. Once infected, you always have chickenpox ready to burst out in the future as shingles. But for the most part, it's dormant and you aren't infectious.

HIV treatment does the same. It doesn't clear your body of HIV, but it does decrease the HIV load to such low levels that it can be undetectable. That, in turn, decreases the likelihood you'll spread it.

These are relatively recent advances. But for the longest time wasn’t that case.

HIV has only really been known for ~40 years. And for at least 10 to 15 of those years research into treatment was limited and stigmatized as it was considered a "gay disease".

The modern treatment regime was developed around 2010. That is, about 15 years.

I'd argue that with the timeline of the disease that's not recent. What's become more recent is the mass availability of treatment and the significantly reduced cost of treatment.

You just made me feel old. Wow 2010, 16 years already

> So without concern for the humans with HIV* there an argument to be made that treating symptoms without curing made it spread more?

No, because HIV treatment is about killing the virus, and we don't have any that only treats the symptoms.

But there is an argument like that for the flu and colds.

There's a significant difference in the risk and mechanisms of transmission between these two viruses. The modern effective reproductive number for HIV is less than 1, about 30-50% lower than ebola in similar subsaharan countries [1][2]. You can get ebola from contact with an infected person's sweat during the active phase [3]. You can get it from their semen years after they have apparently recovered [4]. We don't have treatments that work in this longer term. The drugs that we do have are used during the active infection period to reduce the probability of death during the crisis. Folks are working on reducing the longer term infectiousness but it's a ways off yet [5]. We also don't have pre- or post-exposure prophylactic treatments for the medical workers who are at the highest risk of infection or the family members--the most common transmission mechanisms for ebola are home caregiving and contact with traditional burial practices. In this context of containing an active outbreak, quarantine is mostly helpful in reducing pressure on the medical system for a short term.

Compare this with HIV, which can be rendered untransmittable with modern treatments, which is primarily a sexually transmitted disease, which has pre- and post-exposure treatments. It's simply not very efficient/effective to exile millions of people with a lifelong latent infection and little risk of transmission.

The instinct towards ostracism of those who are perceived as unclean is some pretty primordial lizard brain shit which was a great rule of thumb two thousand years ago, along with wearing garments made of only one kind of material. It's actually actively harmful to the process of stopping infection. It leads to fear, distrust, and reduced reporting, hindering the medical system's ability to reach the people who most need to be reached, and encouraging the spread of superstition and suspicion of pre- and post-exposure treatments. In both diseases, the actual infection risk is modest compared to an airborne virus like COVID.

[1] https://journals.lww.com/jphmp/Abstract/2022/03000/Estimatin...

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34189844/

[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4252165/

[4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7875361/

[5] https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/73/10/1849/6168541?logi...

>I understand the jury is still out on whether a virus can be considered "alive"

I remember way back in med school in the mid-70s our infectious disease professor asking this same question, in a philosophical as much as a mechanistic sense.

Here is the fun thing to think about: If viruses aren't alive, neither are men. Men, too, lack the biological means of reproduction. On the other hand, parthenogenesis may even rarely happen in female humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis

I don't think it's just fatality rate, but also how long it takes to kill you. HIV is a great example of a disease that (untreated) has near 100% mortality rate, but can spread because it takes years to kill you.

The real issue with HIV is that you can easily spread it before being symptomatic, so far we haven’t seen hantavirus spreading before folks become symptomatic. The strain that spreads through humans has been active in south America for a while as well and hasn’t really gone anywhere yet.

Definitely, but the hantavirus incubation period ranges from 1-8 weeks after exposure.

Plague, Inc (an iOS game where you control the parameters of a pandemic and try to get a 100% infection rate) will give you a really good feel for the math behind this.

The most successful strategy is to make a virus that spreads fast, with few visible symptoms until the late stages of the disease. A deadly virus, early will just cause borders to be locked and the international research community to swarm on a cure.

If AIDS were airborne, I think we'de have a fraction of the billions currently living today. It takes a while for symptoms to show up, there is still no real cure, and drugs to keep it supressed took many years to develop.

this is a case specific example of a dynamic that may exist dependent on the properties of the pathogen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myxomatosis#Australia

there are ways to escape the dynamic, such as latency of deleterious symptoms

"It depends" is usually a safe (if not always helpful) answer. The older idea was that viruses always evolve to be less virulent/deadly, but that didn't match observations. The newer idea is simply that of a virulence-transmission trade-off. But there are various assumptions behind both ideas, and not all viruses follow those assumptions, so.. it depends. A decent review: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10066022/

Also worrying that the existing approved vaccine does not protect against this variant.

That said I'm quite hopeful, since there is a vaccine for other strains.

I hear people are calling this the Trump Ebola strain. Many people are saying it.

The WHO is just another politically subverted organization. It declared covid for half an eternity as not airborne. If its connected with a loos of face or economic short term losses- many actors will put the pressur on to prevent the declaration of an pandemic or other travell restrictions.

The us is not involved in this mess.

> us is not involved in this mess

If by not involved you mean still massively subject to the public health and econonomic consequences of a containment failure, then sure.

It figures: Right before the COVID-19 outbreak, Trump dismantled the White House pandemic response team and pushed to downsize the CDC—later pulling out of the WHO entirely. A new Trump term, a new pandemic?

In this case I'd guess the DOGE cuts to foreign aid are a massive, massive contributor to the problem. A lot of third-world countries heavily relied on USAID et al to keep basic sanitation and healthcare going.

how about countries with these risks take action to reduce these risks. I'm sure there's a parable about teaching someone to fish rather than feeding them

> sure there's a parable about teaching someone to fish rather than feeding them

This is less about feeding a neighbor than digging them a latrine so they stop crapping in your water supply.

Wow, why hasn't world leader China and progressive Europe stepped up to make up the difference? Don't they care about their own safety? They should be tripling funding to the WHO. This lies directly at their feet.

> why hasn't world leader China and progressive Europe stepped up to make up the difference?

Why should we expect anyone to step up? The default state of diseases is that they are not managed.

And as China (and maybe even Europe) do pivot, I'm not sure why they'd prioritise preventing it from spreading to Americans (we have troops stationed in the region) versus to their own homelands.

So disease spread in Africa affects America, but disease spread in America doesn't affect China or Europe?

>Why should we expect anyone to step up?

Why should we expect the US to step up? Funny how ONLY the US has responsibility for safeguarding the world, but the supposed new world leaders don't.

It's almost as if the double standard is off the charts.

> Why should we expect the US to step up?

Le all-mighty dollar, it tastes best when given freely no?

> It's almost as if the double standard is off the charts.

I agree. I love how the same people will typically call for US withdrawal from any/all military theatres; whilst promoting sending <FORCED> aid at the end of a needle. I think a lot of these people were of the "lock them up for their covid heresy" category...

If this was China exerting influence I'm sure we'd start complaining there's poison in the needles, bribery and how they should go back and focus on China.

and yet they still do. by that logic move away and stop them visiting. conclusion drawn from your arguments...

> move away and stop them visiting

This is a valid strategic conclusion. It would require America ceding Africa and probably the Middle East as strategic theatres to China and, to a lesser degree, Russia and maybe France. (This may be worth the cost.)

It would also require trade and travel decoupling from both China and Europe, as well as from the Middle East and probably South America and Canada, too, given the transmission vectors inherent in those flows. (This isn’t worth the cost.)

So yes, if Americans accept lower living standards this equilibrium theoretically works. (Even if it’s stupid.) If we want to capitalize on global trade, and be able to vacation and do business wherever we please and have a reasonable expectation of being allowed to return home, on the other hand, and pay a fraction of the gains from the former to safeguard our health, this strategy fails.

The alternative being to tell your neighbour to tell their neighbour to stop defacating in the river or you'll stop paying their bills to bring the analogy closer to home...

If them not fishing means your people are at risk, you go and teach them to fish.

No, it raises the question of what is going wrong if you've spent the last x years teaching them to fish and they still refuse to. Either your approach, their willingness or something else has clearly gone wrong here.

Them not willing to fish still puts your people at risk. At the end of the day you guys still haven’t managed to the wall and keep “aliens” away…

> you guys

I'm a wonderful citizen of heir u-turn starmer unfortunately so plenty of wanting to clear the waterways here :P

theres also one about pennywise, pound foolish

which is the statement being made to cancel the money since after X years there are almost zero deliverables rather than being the a&e dept for the world, in countries where leaders have fleets of sports cars whilst their people die of situations not far from cholera.

> how about countries with these risks take action to reduce these risks

With what money? There's a reason they're dependent on USAID.

> I'm sure there's a parable about teaching someone to fish rather than feeding them

Unfortunately the priorities of USAID (and European foreign aid as well) aren't exactly aligned with that paradigm. It's the worst expressed in agriculture because we just dumped our excess production on Africa to keep our prices stable, but foreign aid being sustainable is a relatively new and not really widespread requirement.

> With what money? There's a reason they're dependent on USAID.

How much does BASIC hygiene cost it's like manners. It's education (which is more than well funded at a "throw cash at it problem".

> we just dumped our excess production

Well in a nutshell, yes we'd dumping quite a lot on Africa, that doesn't mean we should shore up the system with yet another western derived screw-up. At this point I'll go for the good old star trek perspective of impacting a cultures development by suddenly advancing their technological position.

Having clean water access, etc., is a little bit more than "education", in practice

Water + heat + sieve

Unless you have industrial pollutants in which case you also have someone to blame...

We didn't get this far as a species being that ignorant

How callously you blame the victims. Remember your humanity.

I'm not blaming victims, I'm blaming those in charge of helping the victims at the first order of blame. how dare you be so callous as to drop to an emotional attack as a discussion point. please look inwards at your sorry self.

Let me make this clear:

To hell with your historical collective guilt machine.

I honestly dont care what people did before I was born. I had absolutely no decision in anything of theirs. Had no choice in any of that. Nor did I enslave or torture or murder people. My parents didnt either. Their parents didnt either.

And somehow, Im responsible for shit that happened hundreds of years ago? Whatever.

I dont mind helping and working collectively for a human cause. But im also not going to be an emotional collective guilt tampon because people before I was born did bad things.

Id say "Take it up with them", but theyre dead. Thats why you flail at anybody and try to make them feel responsible.

Not feeling guilty and not caring are two radically different things in this context.

First, there are no charges against me.

I will not answer to idiocy like "your bloodline X generations back".

I am not feeling guilty simply because I am not guilty.

And I do not feel guilty about historical happenings I did not have a hand in. They are things to read about to understand how we got here. But caring? No. More like dispassionate historical context.

I fight against shit like "Collective Historical Guilt". Liberals here in the USA use this crap, like in worthless land akcnowldgements but do absolutely nothing.

Ive also seen a lot of republican and MAGA types also have their 'white' ethnicity weaponized. Its obvious when 1 side blames you on a demographic you cant change (skin color). You vote against them.

I will never support collective guilt/punishment. And I will not 'care' about some historical wrongs.

Let's say you likely benefit from the side effects. It's not guilt, but just a lil reminder we are all in this together.

Also, we could talk about current colonialism: arms trade, mining, mercenary armies.

Sure enough, if you close your eyes hard enough you can pretend your wealth is well earned and unrelated the ills of the world.

It's rarely the case.

Thats thats the root of this shit.

Im forced to engage in this system of capitalism. I am not a capitalist. My political power is 1 vote, aka basically nothing.

Because Im forced to engage, Im somehow responsible for the horrors others do. I absolutely reject this absurd line of thought.

Do I try to limit damage on voluntary things I do? Absolutely. Do I also try to help where help is wanted? Yes, I do. Thats also being a good human to fellow humans.

You mention: arms trade, mining, mercenary armies.

Ive never traded weapons. I dont even own any guns.

Mining? Im in the process of rewilding my property back to more forest. Im also getting rid of invasives previous owners planted (english ivy, etm).

And thanfulky, Im not a mercernary army. Ffs, really?

I have absolutely 0 sway on any of these topics. And I wont ever. Im not a politician, whose votes really do count.

> Sure enough, if you close your eyes hard enough you can pretend your wealth is well earned and unrelated the ills of the world.

I guess youre one of those types that because I might identify as "white" thats im a millionaire or otherwise abuse people at scale to make billions.

Protip: im not. Most of the jobs I worked was in food service or factory work. And all your accusatory platitudes are as deep as a porta-potty.

And yeah, there is no ethical consumption in capitalism. Its all exploitation, at every scale and measure. Dont have a whole lot of choices about it. Cry harder.

Let me make this clear:

The United States predates you, and will almost certainly outlive you.

You, an individual with a microscopic lifespan and negligible influence in the grand sweep of history, do not in fact share any guilt for the things your ancestors did, nor do you deserve credit for the greatness they wrought. The United States, however, deserves blame where guilty and praise where worthy for what it did during its lifespan, which expands hundreds of years into the past, and with luck will continue into the future.

It’s not all about you.

USAID provided funding for a lot of stuff, but specifically with regards to infectious disease control, providing funding for infectious disease control in countries that don't have the resources or priorities to do it on their own addresses the risk that such diseases are not controlled and spread to the US and also the risk that such diseases spread and result in (negative) economic impact for the US.

The disease control interventions really are a mix of teaching and doing. In acute situations, experts are brought in to do (some of) the things. But mostly it's training and outreach and supplying equipment to do routine disease control and surveillance of issues that need help.

> I'm sure there's a parable about teaching someone to fish rather than feeding them

That's literally what USAID was providing. Both teaching fish AND also feeding them.

so left hand fighting the right by that logic, either the education/infrastructure work wasn't/isn't working or the aid is too appealing...

How about the poor, just stop being poor?

Or the stupid stop being so loud

They are. This is why the billionaire tech class is complacent in this disaster. Musk is already a mass murderer due his illegal sabotage of USAID (estimates of 600000 deaths already [1]) this new outbreak adds to his death toll.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary...

Notably (from NPR):

>However WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stressed in a statement it "does not meet the criteria of pandemic emergency" and advised countries against closing their borders.

and let's not forget "no evidence of human to human transmission"...

> "no evidence of human to human transmission"

Directly contradicted by the WHO: "...spreads from person to person through direct contact with the blood, secretions, organs, or other bodily fluids of infected individuals or contaminated surfaces" [1].

[1] https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2...

That’s a reference to the early Covid 19 investigations/reporting.

https://x.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152?lang=en

Ooooh, got it.

People always bring this up as if there is some collective responsibility for they themselves having believed an obviously politically motivated narrative. Like personally I'd just take some responsibility, admit I was suckered, and try to do better in the future. But rather with the context of how it's brought up, it's clear they're just still at it buying into new nonsense political narratives. "Can't get fooled again"

You could interpret this kind of statement as a hardline “never trust anything the government says” stance. You could also interpret it as espousing healthy skepticism.

You can’t tell which it is from a one line comment, so it’s not at all clear the person who said this is buying into any particular political narrative.

I'd call it unhealthy skepticism. Someone who is operating at the level where they might have blindly trusted what the WHO says does not need a push that merely makes them more skeptical of the WHO while remaining hopelessly non-skeptical of all the other manipulators sending narratives their way.

> while remaining hopelessly non-skeptical of all the other manipulators

You insist on assuming based on a one-line comment that the person is a gullible sheeple. And maybe they are, but I fail to see how you have established this.

It's the exact same one line comment made by lots of other people advocating a particularly malevolent political movement, so yes this is the reasonable inference (your inflammatory description notwithstanding). If OP intended some nuanced point, they didn't do the work to expound upon it. And while I certainly have sympathy for how intellectual libertarian discussion points get colonized by populist authoritarian movements, the dynamic is what it is.

> some nuanced point

it's not nuanced to point out a very large statement which at the time was very VERY anti-trumpian and pro ultra-left, lest not forget "hug a tourist", "lets change the popular naming conventions to technical" and, "oh crap too late now human to human is higher than anything we've seen before" which is basically all memory holed now

Man, you sure love your tiny strawmen.

Institutions, as well as large groups, most certainly have their flaws and failings, and often downright suck in the eyes of those of us who put in the work to self actualize. But unfortunately it seems that most people are hopelessly wed to following some kind leader, so the alternative we get from undermining institutions is that they just crave replacements that merely validate their own feelings. Touchstones that would have been previously considered individualist are now simply supporting mass self-centeredness (eg the anti-mask wackos). If you want to make individualist arguments, then you need to do the work of adding nuance that sets them apart from that!

> the anti-mask wackos

Well thank you for your service to stupidity. The only measure of worth was actual social distancing which was quickly admonished by the pointless mask arguments as nauseum. No, there is no science good to bad to back up things which are broken by common sense, virii spread in Japan at the same rate as the west after accounting for population densities. (faster without the correction as you'd expect) So let's just move on.

Please, oh please, do not start with some form of "the masses seek to be ruled". The only, only end of that game is to justify totalitarianism which is often what those arguing the point are stupid enough to believe they are arguing against.

If you're going to make an argument for they need lead then yes. And we need both control in the dining water. But we'll never see my version of an idealised advancing civilisation because of "mah feels", "personal experiences" and such drivel.

You may not be used to hearing this but if I was to be grading you you'd get a pass for a coherent sentence but a fail for correctness and coherency, in short. You are wrong.

> The only measure of worth was actual social distancing

It's been conclusively shown that N95+ masks blocked the virus particles. IIRC every form of the anti-masking argument was of the form that they were not necessary for general population, not that they did not work. If you want to point me to some research that shows masks are ineffective in eg healthcare settings, go right ahead.

In my experience, anti-masking behavior was also strongly associated with people who wouldn't social distance, because we're really talking about proxies for "this is real and I am trying to take prudent measures".

> do not start with some form of "the masses seek to be ruled"

So then how do you explain the current embrace of open fascism? The many disingenuous appeals to lofty ideals of individual freedom, that when followed culiminate in support for autocratic authoritarianism? I sure fucking wish people would choose the individualist enlightened freedom path when presented, but it always seems to go sideways.

> The only, only end of that game is to justify totalitarianism

NGOs and government public health authorities issuing non-binding advice is not totalitarian, and calling it so in the context of the current political climate in the US is preposterous. Less than half of US states had any form of lockdown, yet from the amount it was talked about we can see where the bulk of the histrionics lay.

No. Not at all. The simulations were based on old data with the artificial cut off. The particles were and are much much smaller. Please don't recite rhetoric and do some reading.

And frankly I'm saddened that you're arguing for an educated by tryany and trying to make things political which are simply fact based

It's healthy to remain sceptical of all information, pointing out a very widely blindly trusted organisation has serious problems which means this trust and faith placed in it is blind is NOT "an enemy of my enemy" situation.

That leads to sectarianism.

The WHO can both simultaneously be responsible for many good things and have very bad leadership doing more harm than good in other areas. But pointing out that dichotomy of the truth is beyond the conversational chattering class I fear.

no, I bring it up as a perfect example on how the w.h.o. came to a political solution despite masses of evidence to the contrary. every. single. time.

I suspect this is to mitigate perverse incentives for countries to avoid reporting outbreaks and collaborating with the WHO for fear of tanking their economy

The headline from the WHO reads:

Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern

https://www.who.int/news/item/17-07-2019-ebola-outbreak-in-t...

Your linked article is dated at

> 17 July 2019

(people never seem to look for/check dates any more)

Its even in the pasted url!

In my defence, it was the top search result using one of the common search providers, and at least it goes to the WHO website rather than the New York Times.

Why would a search engine turn up a 7 year old reference as the top hit.

Seems like the sort of thing one could end up relying on and dead.

Coincidentally (or perhaps not), their recent article claims the same thing: https://www.who.int/news/item/17-05-2026-epidemic-of-ebola-d...

> Pursuant to paragraph 2 of Article 12 - Determination of a public health emergency of international concern, including a pandemic emergency of the International Health Regulations (2005) (IHR), the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), after having consulted the States Parties where the event is known to be currently occurring, is hereby determining that the Ebola disease caused by Bundibugyo virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda constitutes a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), but does not meet the criteria of pandemic emergency, as defined in the IHR.

Ooops.

Yeah that was not intentional.

seems like an abuse of the word "global"

> seems like an abuse of the word "global"

The WHO language is "a public health emergency of international concern," but not "a pandemic emergency."

No, if it makes to a busy long distance travel hub, there is ample cause for global. Everywhere should contribute to containing this, out of pure self-interest if nothing else.

We went through this whole song and dance in 2014. Unless it has some really unlucky novel mutations it won’t spread well outside the tropics.

> Unless it has some really unlucky novel mutations

2014 was Ebolavirus proper (Zaire, I believe). This outbreak is this fucker of a chimera [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundibugyo_ebolavirus

Non-paywalled link: https://apnews.com/article/congo-ebola-uganda-who-africa-eme...

Multiple articles mention a vaccine for the Zaire strain but not this one. Is it possible to use one for the other? Does the existence of one make it easier to develop another?

Technically (nitpicking) it mentions no _approved_ vaccine. There can be vaccines without being approved for use in said countries.

But I have no clue how far along vaccines are, and even if they exist how feasible it would be to use in e.g Congo. Similar to how we can treat tuberculosis, yet many people keep dying of it.

> There can be vaccines without being approved for use in said countries.

Unfortunately, the hotbed being Africa makes the situation much worse given historical events - the entire continent has a dark history regarding colonial and modern abuses of power for medical "experiments" [1], and the entire topic resurfaced during the early Covid era [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_experimentation_in_Afr...

[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/4/8/medical-colonial...

Ah yes, WHO, the very trustworthy totally non political global public health authority that did such a great unbiased job before and during COVID. Definitely trustworthy, reputable, competent, and unbiased.

Snark aside, there may be an Ebola outbreak and no doubt it's affecting certain African countries but calling it a global health emergency is laughable and I'd trust TMZ's analysis on reporting orders of magnitude more than I'd ever trust anything the WHO has to say.

Sorry, your takeaway from Covid is to ignore public-health experts when they warn that something is breaking containment and could turn into a pandemic if it isn't controlled?

WHO tried to cover up the virus at the beginning; they also aided China in masking its origins.

The CDC did fine, but not WHO. I wouldn't even call WHO public health experts at this point - it's just a political racket that's pretty analogous to the UN generally in terms of how objective and useful they are.

I've had 12+ COVID vaccines and one of my degrees is a BSc so it isn't like I'm some antivaxxing conspiratorial anti-science hillbilly. WHO isn't really about science though, they're about funding and pushing particular agendas which is... antithetical to actual science.

I think it’s very arguable that the WHO tried to cover up the virus or aided China in masking its origins.

The WHO relies on voluntary cooperation by its member states. China did try to downplay the outbreak and delayed sharing data with the WHO that indicated human-to-human transmission. It didn’t look great for the WHO to praise China’s “cooperation”, but they could hardly excoriate China for not sharing information and then expect them to cooperate.

The CDC made its own share of mistakes during the beginning of the pandemic, including insisting _against_ masking at first. Frequently, the CDC’s own advice was influenced by the first Trump administration, so I would not say the CDC is any less exposed to US political influence than the WHO is to the political influence of its member states.

These days, given that the CDC has been hollowed out by the second Trump administration and the US defunded and left the WHO, I’m not sure either organization can be trusted to be effective. The CDC has gone on an anti-science bender and the WHO probably lacks the resources to maintain effectiveness. If anything, I’d be worried the WHO isn’t raising _enough_ concern about new disease outbreaks.

Also, you should probably specify what “agendas” the WHO is pushing such that warning countries to beware the spread of a deadly hemorrhagic virus is morally dubious.

> calling it a global health emergency is laughable

Your complaint is with the NYT's re-phrasing, not the WHO.

WHO declaration is: "determined a public health emergency of international concern" https://www.who.int/news/item/17-05-2026-epidemic-of-ebola-d...

Obviously it's a local public health emergency, and some international concern seems warranted anytime an ebola strain pops up...

adding it to my list of apocalypses to prepare for

First hantavirus now this. Look, there's valid reason to be concerned here but people who are fearing a repeat of the Covid-19 pandemic are seemingly missing why Covid was a pandemic. Covid spread so much for four main reasons:

1. It could spread airborne;

2. It spread relatively easily. Not quite measles-level of contagiousness but still, pretty good;

3. Unlike something like the flu, there really wasn't any kind of natural resistance. What we now call the modern flu is a descendant of the Spanish flu that killed tends of millions in 1919-1920 in its first outbreak and it becamse less lethal for a variety of reasons; and

4. (This is the big one) It would spread when the carrier was asymptomatic. The flu can also spread asymptomatically but AFAIK it's less common. People with the flu tend to self-isolate showing symptoms.

Still, what's probably most concerning about Covid is the number of people who truly believe it was and is fake. The public health implications of that as well as the societal and psychological impacts is something we're going to be studying for decades to come.

The exact contagion mechanism for hantavirus isn't confirmed. Previously it's been from, say, rat to human. It's believed there was human-to-human transmission with the plague cruise ship of doom but whatever the case, it's simply not as contagious.

Ebola generally requires contact to spread. How it's spread in a lot of these African regions has historically been from funeral rites. Family of the deceased would touch the body and this contact would spread the disease. So while it was quite contagious, it didn't spread airborne (as far as we know). It's also quite lethal, which naturally tends to limit spread. The king of long-dormant viruses is of course HIV.

But at least we aren't dealing with cordyceps [1] so we've got that going for us at least.

[1]: https://thelastofus.fandom.com/wiki/Cordyceps_brain_infectio...

Covid turned into a pandemic because it wasn't taken seriously at the start. (Looking at you, China.)

Public-health experts never seemed concerned about hantavirus. They are with this. It's appropriate to take their declarations seriously.

> Ebola generally requires contact to spread

"Human infection occurs through close contact with the blood or secretions of infected wildlife, such as bats or non-human primates, and subsequently spreads from person to person through direct contact with the blood, secretions, organs, or other bodily fluids of infected individuals or contaminated surfaces. Transmission is particularly amplified in health-care settings when infection prevention and control (IPC) measures are inadequate, and during unsafe burial practices involving direct contact with the deceased" [1].

So yes on traditional burial. But much easier to spread than HIV.

[1] https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2...

First, we still don't know the origins of Covid-19. The most accepted answer is zoonotic origin but there are problems with that, namely that Wuhan is far from the suspected bats and there is no documented case of Covid-19 in any wild population. The other competing theory is the "lab leak" family but again there's no evidence of this eitehr. Research and findings of Covid-19 in Italian sewerage suggest that Covid-19 might've been circulating in Italy in 2019 [1]. So another possibility is that Covid-19 resulted from forming a virulent strain in a person who was infected with multiple strains at once [2].

We may never know the true origins of Covid-19.

So with asymptomatic spread and a novel virus, it's unlikely that whatever China did actually mattered at all. Once cases reached the US in particular, it was game over. People just can't miss work. There were very few places that maintain zero Covid for any significant period of time (eg Australia) through a combination of luck, geography and extreme quarantine. By geography I mean Australia doesn't have any land borders. And even then it only lasted so long.

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7428442/

[2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9059428/

>Research and findings of Covid-19 in Italian sewerage suggest that Covid-19 might've been circulating in Italy in 2019 [1].

Nah, it is one paper, and they only did PCR which is extremely sensitive.

It is more likely that they contaminated their samples than they found COVID viruses. It is still more likely they had false positives.

Also they didn't sequence it. There is no data on where it would be in the genetic tree of coronaviruses.

From the paper: >Moreover, it was circulating in different geographic regions simultaneously

Very very likely to be sample contamination or another winter coronavirus triggering a positive PCR. It just doesn't make any sense.

China actually took COVID extremely seriously from the start. They were snatching people from the streets and killing them. The China crematoriums were running non-stop.

It was the US Administration and the Republicans that were the dipshits and turned a health situation into politics.

That was months after the virus was already spreading. China oscillated from pretending it didn't exist in the critical outbreak period (2019), to some of the most extreme lockdowns (early 2020).

Maaan, flashback to how fucking thrilling that time was when there were reports of single digit cases slowly hitting closer home, rapidly building up to a "Holy shit! This is going to be a historic crisis!" when dead bodies started pilling up in front of Italian hospitals. No drug could ever tingle my dopamine receptors like the news ramp up of COVID19 did. What a collective experience. In a parallel universe it's been the event to unite humanity, instead of dividing families.

> They were snatching people from the streets and killing them.

Can you give more info on this? Tried googling it but couldn't find much. I remember there were very strict quarantines, but don't remember reading anything about "killing" people snatched from the street.

forgot 5. Covid was exactly the right amount of deadly, 0.5-1% which made it easy to "roll the dice" on making containment harder.

> Covid was exactly the right amount of deadly, 0.5-1%

Tough to say that's "exactly the right amount of deadly" for a pandemic when the Black Death and Spanish flu killed larger fractions of their total affected populations (in the latter case, of humans) [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics_and_pandemic...

Perhaps fairer to say post germ-theory pandemic. During Spanish Flu it was in its infancy. During the black death it was all about miasma.

Also, the window for spread with the ability to get on a plane and be on the other side of the world post infection, but pre symptoms is a "latter half of the 20th century" thing.

It was good practice for pandemic response. I think (blasphemy, which on its own is wild) the global reaction was too strong on an acute level, but was worth it as prepararion for a deadlier pandemic.

It was a natural reaction though. People saw the Italian hospitals overflowing and thought "oh crap! We can't let that happen here!" At least where I am they tightened and/or relaxed restrictions on a county by county level based on how full hospital beds were getting.

Which makes sense - the british called it flattening the curve. No matter how well funded your health service, it doesn't have enough beds, staff or supplies (like ventilators) for a widespread pandemic, because that would be wasteful (of public funds in a single-payer system, and of money that would otherwise be profit in a private system).

In another time it might have been good practice, but in reality I think, between the grifters pushing fear and those just too self-centered to go a few months without a haircut (yes oversimplifying and straw-manning), it actually precluded the chance that many people will ever cooperate with a pandemic response again.

Or it was too little because it still spread easily?

I'm on the border of three countries and you'd always see symptom reports go up in a region, sewage analyses go up, hospitalizations go up, and finally shortly before mortality started to show an increase (several weeks' lag from the moment of infection) they'd decide "guys, here's the statistics, we have to lock down now". Yeah great, now that everyone caught it they have to pretend being on the ball. And people still literally rioted against lockdowns. Or the masking thing, the resistance against filtering your breath... at this "too strong" level in your opinion, I don't see that the outcome was significantly different from "yolo protect yourself as much as you like but don't expect anyone else to be mindful"

and that's a whopping over-estimate

Absolutely not.

https://github.com/mbevand/covid19-age-stratified-ifr

in terms of an age corrected population distribution, actually I think you'll find it's lower. that's the whole point of "at risk" in this scenario being mostly age >70yr (or wherever you chose to draw your risk factors) also this is tends to be over-estimating as the reported infection rates are failing to account for asymptomatic carriers which themselves follow an age-based distribution (I'm sorry but as far as a systematic goes, this is poorly recorded, poorly understood and very very poorly modelled, which is made even worse by the politicization of cv19 causing an mis-representation in people volunteering for randomized testing in a large number of western datasets). Again in very high population countries with poor vaccine rates, uptake and very slow roll-out we didn't end up with hundreds of thousands of bodies stacked high ready to be buried. that unfortunately is a large-scale uncomfortable truth to quite a few.

>in terms of an age corrected population distribution, actually I think you'll find it's lower

The data I linked is giving IFR for each age band, so that people see the actual data instead of sweeping affirmations like "the IFR is X" or "the IFR isn't X".

The data is also coming from multiple studies, some under very controlled conditions with systematic testing, such as military service recruits, or prisoners.

>Again in very high population countries with poor vaccine rates, uptake and very slow roll-out we didn't end up with hundreds of thousands of bodies stacked high ready to be buried. that unfortunately is a large-scale uncomfortable truth to quite a few.

I leave this here:

https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/4/26/mass-funeral-pyr...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/30/brazil-manaus-...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/27/ive-seen-too-m...

It is your negation of reality (and the death of so many people) that might be uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable.

_sigh_ 2020, 2021.... I'm talking about clearly 2023 onwards once it was crystal clear to everyone fluent in actual stats what the risks were.

Again, give me the ~15million bodies we expect to see dead in India for a 1% fatality vs the ~100k that is a -serious- discrepancy from a nation that hasn't mastered other hygiene issues yet at a national level. And I'm supposed to believe they magically conquered cv19 better than the crazed lockdown nations of the west?

simply voting against brexit helped save gran remember: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3955345

Oh please don't give me the "le multiple studies in bio" argument. By that logic magic mushrooms and witchcraft are far more reliable due to 'working' for centuries. The field is full of reproducibility crises and follow the leader herd mentality, chemistry, even bio-informatics maybe, but bio as a whole, eesh...

Collecting the data in controlled conditions is exactly my point, you're trying to infer to a whole general populous on something that became insanely politically charged. Given the complete absence of admitting this or even trying to factor this into studies makes the whole thing a stack of cards.

100k? Closer to 2 million (in a country with a median age below 30 and a very pyramidal age distribution).

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12615008/

>_sigh_ 2020, 2021.... I'm talking about clearly 2023 onwards

Oh, yeah, the IFR after almost everyone was either infected, vaccinated or both. Great job here, champion of stats and "proper" biology.

So your position is 0.01 Vs 0.001 and given error bars bigger than that you're arguing that I'm clearly wrong to say 0.1 is wrong... Slow clap...

The IFR for COVID was ~0.1%, about the same as measles.

> People with the flu tend to self-isolate showing symptoms.

Do you have any other fantasy tales you’d like to tell?

Yea, I recently caught flu from someone else that "could not miss their work". So these things don't really apply well to the US at all.

Yep. This is called "food service".

Shit pay, no benefits, and managers who threaten to fire you if you dont show up. Sick? Puke in the bathroom.

Whys this the case? Cause we Americans have garbage for labor laws. You can be fired for pretty much any reason. And you are NOT protected if youre sick.

When I had to work food seevice, at starbucks, subway, random pizza chain, etc, I begrudgingly came in sick, infected LOADS of customers. My choice was to work, or get fired (or not fired but 0 hours for next 2 weeks on schedule as punishment).

Who knows how many I got sick and potentially killed due to compromised immune systems. Im sure I did.

This is the real, hidden external cost, of our unmitigated capitalism. People get sick and die for the reason of making the boss more money, and too fucking bad.

>Cause we Americans have garbage for labor laws

And healthcare being tied to "having a good enough job".

But yea, it's a huge mess.

Divorcing health care from employment would be a wonderful change, but I don't see it ever happening. Employers love it because it makes employees fear for their job, and insurers love it because if everybody saw how much they were actually paying every month they would fight to change the system.

Was it actually flu, or just a bad cold?

I've had flu twice, and both times I simply wouldn't have been able to leave the house no matter how much I wanted to - even just turning over in bed was a major effort!

Would people not have spotted their shivering and sweating and sent them straight home again?

Influenza symptoms vary widely from person to person and strain to strain. All the way from symptomless to dead.

The US has poor employee regulations though, most other well developed nations have figured out people being sick at work doesn't help.

In Australia, full-time employees (38 hours or more a week) will grant you 10 sick days a year. You can use this at effectively any time (Some employers may request medical certificates for consecutive days) but when using it, you are paid your full normal rate for the hours you are away from work for. Once you run out of sick leave, you can then use "unpaid sick leave", which is exactly what you expect.

https://www.fairwork.gov.au/leave/sick-and-carers-leave

The world is bigger than the US. Also, not everybody in the US is an underpaid service worker with no benefits. Also, if you limit yourself to just the US, you're still just wrong [1]:

> Approximately one-quarter (26%, n = 303/1169) of adults (aged 16–64 years) with self-reported ILI took time off work for their illness for a mean of 3.3 days, compared with 31% (n = 31/99) and 20% (n = 3/15) of those with confirmed influenza A or B, respectively, who reported missing a mean of 3.8 and 3.0 days.

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9748403/

You've replied to the wrong comment.

Anyway: taking time off work when too sick to work != isolating when the symptoms first appear.

I swear there is an element of the virus that drives you out of isolation, to spread it?.

It always goes like this with me, the first few days:

- Hm, am I coming down with something? Not too sure. Feel a bit under the weather

- I'm feeling great! Let's go shopping/for coffee/to the supermarket/see friends

- OHH I definitely have flu

2, 3 and 4 apply to the hantavirus as well.

Hantavirus does not easily

Just finished watching the last episode of season 2 with my daughter this morning. Now biting my nails for another 6-12 months awaiting season 3... Dammit.

"no evidence of human to human transmission", was something repeated far too often and far too politically for me to take them serious on the next issue, serious or not.

> "It would spread when the carrier was <LARGELY> asymptomatic" , the largely is very important here otherwise containment would have been a lot different.

The main concerns for covid were also limited to a novel strain of a known virus type (again a KNOWN TYPE) being released into a global general populous with no inherent immunity. Aka expect ~5% of cases to probably have complications and some smaller %-age of that to be serious. If we didn't know what covid was we wouldn't be calling it "covid-19" to expressly describe which genus we're talking about. (Followed by general stupidity from people of pretending we don't know how other covid strains progress (regardless of any 'novel' effects)). Sill no sensible scenario put death rates >1% for anyone not in an at risk group. I mean everyone forgets the south-park sars skit that there's a 97% chance of catching that practically without symptoms. Why this became polarised about steam rolling through untested technology onto the populous is identical to the "green coal" and "tech will solve the carbon footprint" thinking...

I’ll solve the second to last one for you! I know multiple people who had Covid, and very quickly died, of Covid.

How metabolically unhealthy were they? .

Something like half the population in the US is "metabolically unhealthy". Hopefully the new weight loss drugs will fix some of this.

You know what would help fix this.

Tapeworms.

Are you sure you aren't "metabolically unhealthy"? Are you sure that if you happen to die, we won't find any "underlying health condition" during your autopsy? Are you fine with you death being dismissed as "got what he deserved"?

I got COVID 3 times, was sick for about a week with a bad flu and then it went away. All my friends had similiar experiences. The only people I know that were struck the hardest were those that were obese and had other health issues.

Nobody deserves to die from the flu, but the flu doesn't give a damn about what you do or don't deserve, just about your body's ability to handle fighting off infections.

The flu doesn't care, yes; the question is more "do you?". Because, you know, the flu, or COVID, doesn't spontaneously appear. Every single person who died has been contaminated by someone else, who has some responsibility in it... Especially if they were flippant about it.

What is this supposed to mean?

Is it not self evident that the vulnerable tend toward being that subset of the population that, on average, suffer the most.

This usually means the very young, the elderly / frail aged, and those with co-morbidities especially obesity and immunocompromising conditions. There’s also a socioeconomic aspect, where as wealth increases health also tends to increase.

How do we slice it in these cases? Was it the virus that resulted in the worst of the negative health impacts?

again, personal experience != global facts, I'm sorry for your loss (I assume you liked those people, you don't say) but facts are facts.

Global fact: millions died.

Global fact most died from a related underlying disease and COVID simply hastened on the process. Actually killed from just this is way below the 1M mark globally.

Also we've now reached vitD in kids cereals and butter so you know, we know how to avoid this...

> 4. (This is the big one) [...] People with the flu tend to self-isolate showing symptoms.

Even if optimistically 80% of people do that (in western europe I'd guess it's more like 45%+/-20, might be better elsewhere), if the spreading ability is high (points 1 and 2), you get a bus full of people infected by the two out of ten individuals that decide calling in sick isn't worth it

Technically you can only call in sick when you are literally not able to do your job, and that's not the case if you're just coughing and feel cold or so. Even if your employer might prefer that you don't take the whole team down with you, people's judgement seems to very much be on the "it'll be fine" side. Idk that this is 'the big one' outside of a 2-out-of-100 years pandemic situation where people are exceedingly careful and paranoid

> could spread airborne

...and even though it was more or less immediately clear it could, the public health authorities dragged their feet admitting it was spreading via airborne transmission (to preserve PPE for healthcare workers), allowing it to get way more out of control than it would have.

Ebola is no laughing matter, it takes cargo planes full of chlorine and plastic sheeting to contain. But it is "easy" to contain if you respect it and do the necessary. And because a big part of "the necessary" is social, and it "luckily" recurs in the same societies, people get better and better at containing it.

Wishing my MSF and WHO friends the best.

> 4. (This is the big one) It would spread when the carrier was asymptomatic.

This was also quickly found to be false. From memory the spread was 98.8% symptomatic, 1.2% pre-symptomatic, and 0% symptomatic. Granted you can't tell pre-symptomatic from asymptomatic beforehand, but with such a low proportion of infections being in that category it shouldn't have been a concern.

Most people don't think COVID-19 was/is "fake" per se. Most people just think the situation was overblown.

It is a sickness most analogous to the common cold or flu. Both of which suck, both of which you SHOULD self-isolate for, although the conditions, spread and death toll is effectively the same (or lesser) than that of the cold or flu. Which no matter how you spin it, the Global restrictions were too harsh.

The majority of people believe something fake about Covid [1]. While the number of people who think it was a hoax or otherwsise completely fake is pretty low, I've seen figures that it was as high as 13% in the early pandemic, which is millions of people.

We still have people who believe in ivermectin, don't believe in vaccines and somehow still think the vaccine is more dangerous despite there being at least 7 million Covid deaths recorded and, well, 7 million fewer vaccine deaths.

The health and hospital system was in total collapse. The lockdowns helped slow the spread. Were it not for that, many more would've died. Even so, we had not enough ventilators such that doctors and nurses essentially had to choose who lived and who died. The collective trauma on healthcare workers is something we'll be dealing with for years.

What really scares me is how otherwise educated people can fall for the misinformation and absolutely nothing will convince them otherwise. It's basically a mind virus with no cure.

[1]: https://www.kff.org/health-information-trust/covid-19-misinf...

Whenever someone complains about the overreacting to COVID, I recall the morgues that ran out of room so they had refrigerated shipping containers to hold bodies.

If a virus gets bad enough that the hospitals can't handle the intake and the morgues can't handle the dead, it's serious. I don't see how this is controversial.

I know it was a bad deal for kids and I'm not sure the response was perfect.

I couldn't agree with you more.

On this:

> What really scares me is how otherwise educated people can fall for the misinformation and absolutely nothing will convince them otherwise. It's basically a mind virus with no cure.

Its weird when you think about it in this way, but there's no evolutionary pressure for human beings to either become tame and servile and trusting of authority ("for their own good") or independent tinfoil-clad "freethinkers". We substituted evolutionary pressure that used to come from the environment and hardships of life for media consumption in a way that matchmaking/pair-bonding is done (for example) by what news channel you chose to follow. The search for "actual Truth" (with a big T, as in factual perception of reality) is not necessarily an evolutionary advantage. It can be an ecological hindrance. IMHO, this is downright unsettling.

At the same time, I understand how this type of mystical thinking can come from distrust in authority figures and organizations. For example, I know the approximate distance from the Earth to the moon, except I cannot ever really verify it, therefore I must source this information from third parties, such as Wikipedia. Thing is, I'm comfortable with the fact that the best answer I can give to some questions is "I don't know", but I'm pretty sure that there's no global conspiracy to hide from me the fact that the moon is actually a big piece of cheese.

You missed lab origin and cover up during the initial spread.

"It is unclear how that [closure of US-AID program] might have affected the response to this outbreak."

But, we'll just throw that in to the story anyway, even though we have no facts either way.

Just wondering, do you think it's not relevant to help the reader understand context on the US' impact? Positive or negative?

The larger paragraph I pulled that from strongly implies that it's a negative, but then they weasel by throwing in the "it's unclear how that affected anything" line.

> we'll just throw that in to the story anyway, even though we have no facts either way

We don't have a tight chain of causation. But we have plenty of facts pointing entirely one way.

We know there was "a critical four-week detection gap between the onset of symptoms of the presumed index case...and the laboratory confirmation of the outbreak" [1]. This has contributed to "significant uncertainties to the true number of infected persons and geographic spread associated with this event at the present time" [2]. And tying all of this back to DOGE, we know USAID's "more than 50 staffers dedicated to outbreak response" were cut to "just six people to handle Ebola, Marburg virus, mpox and bird flu preparedness" [3].

Musk and Trump didn't cause this outbreak. But we would have had a better chance of catching this sooner, and with more precision, if we had those resources there.

[1] https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2...

[2] https://www.who.int/news/item/17-05-2026-epidemic-of-ebola-d...

[3] https://www.spyuganda.com/another-one-us-cuts-aid-to-fight-e...

It’s unclear because we don’t yet know all the consequences of the shutdown of USAID. But, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for people to wonder if the closure of an agency that worked extensively in developing countries worldwide and might have had front line data about this outbreak could have affected the response.

Welcome to HackerNews, new hacker!

Rather than posting things like this, please take a moment to review the posting guidelines[0], so that you can be a positive member of the community.

0 – https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> so that you can be a positive member of the community.

I'll bite and argue that the parent is a totally positive new member of the community, by the virtue of demonstrating the right attitude to this old beaten biohazard doomsday scarecrow.

Tell that to the millions of people who suffer from long COVID that a warning about potentially deadly viruses is just a “old beaten biohazard scarecrow”. We don’t even know all the consequences of infection with COVID-19 yet, and that includes for people who had it but “it was just a bad cold”. Humans are incapable of intuitively judging the risks of things they can’t immediately see or feel, which is why we rely on rigorous science to do otherwise. Certainly, this is an event that members of the community can find of interest or of concern, _especially_ those members not living in a Western country or those who are immunocompromised.

Thank you for your argument. I'm not personally interested in rehashing complaints about covid response, but it is nonetheless a nontrivial, good-faith contribution.

My previous comment was a welcome and guidance on good posting here on HN, simply restating what the community posting guidelines[0] already say.

In general, comments like "I don't care about this post", with nothing else added, aren't particularly constructive, nor are posts complaining that people downvoted them[1][2] (which the HN community guidelines also politely and specifically ask posters to avoid). Such feelings are better served by flagging and/or moving on.

Anyhow, thanks for your contributions. Sincerely, a fellow hacker, and fellow human equal to you and equalled by you.

0 – https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

1 – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48171125

2 – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48171139

Been there during the covid frenzy, my friend! For not loving that proverbial grandma.

It's not related to computers and is irrelevant to anyone not in Africa right now. Repent.

If that's what you expect from HN you will be very disappointed

People still wear masks? Which part of the world?

Haven’t seen a single on since 2022 in Sweden.

By "imported ebola" you of course mean repatriated a fine American citizen:

> Brantly attended Abilene Christian University in Texas, where he earned an undergraduate degree in biblical text in 2003. It was here, at ACU, where he pledged Pi Kappa, a men's social club founded on a deep sense of Christian brotherhood, regardless of which denomination that member belonged to

Say what you or I will about religion, this is someone who was putting its better teachings into action. Meanwhile, you societal arsonists have jumped the shark long ago.

A fine American citizen with ebola

Yes, that was implied by the context. We get it - in your societal arsonist worldview, there is always some reason to other someone else, leave them to fend for themselves, and relish in their suffering as just desserts. And so you begrudge a halfway-competent government that didn't let that happen.

Didn’t they do this like a decade ago?

You can expect a lot of these kinds of fear based message hurled into the world in the upcoming years.

The nice thing about the DRC is there isn't a few billion people living in it. If this was China or India it would be right back to 2019 levels of growth. There is a huge population damper before it can become global pandemic.