That's not how the conversation reads to me. There's a difference between Disease models project a rapidly rising toll and Disease modelers project a rapidly rising toll. I am happy to see that the WHO director, for the moment, appears to be the more rational, scientific authority, and the horror-story author was the one who Worst-case scenarios can be effective motivators to action, but we should remember that diverting resources toward Ebola prevents them from being used for other valuable ends, perhaps including fighting AIDS. If we simply chase after sensational and misleading headlines, we will focus on child homelessness one week and drug policy the next.the disease modelers were working with current trends, before the West had started pouring serious money into the fight
And still the WHO director was on NPR this morning projecting that we could see up to 10,000 deaths in the next 6-9 months. It's like she's living in another universe, one in which reality is one possibility among many, a choose-your-own-adventure horror edition of sorts.
figured it'd probably crest around 4m next year, hundreds of millions the year after
Certainly I'm glad my words turned out to be hyperbolic, but it's not really a fair comparison between AIDS and ebola, epidemiologically speaking. AIDS is a slow progress towards awareness, prevention, treatment. Ebola is an acute crisis that requires active mitigating steps stem its spread. Also, there's lots of evidence that it's not really being contained in Sierra Leone, so we shouldn't pretend that just because it's out of the daily headlines that there isn't still a significant threat to countless Africans. Also, one would hope that the WHO director is a better scientific authority than I am on infectious disease. But that doesn't mean that the efforts of the WHO were adequate in the beginning, or that she wasn't right by luck rather than science. At that time, everything the WHO was saying seemed to be contradicted by doctors and nurses on the ground. Since that time, we've seen a herculean effort by the US, EU and many NGOs that have paid dividends. Her projections are looking good in hindsight, but could she have foresaw this global response, a response that, you'll remember, wasn't in place at that time? Perhaps. I don't know. To me, she sounded like a politician denying that sky is blue.