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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 meddle 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 the violence tearing apart 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 exploited 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. The Congo suffers from a "resource curse", and I'm afraid it will be exploited until long after I die.
EDIT: there are other resources, some better than others.
EDIT2: cleaned up my language a little bit to reflect the seriousness of the topic.
The War That Doesn't Say Its Name, also by Jason Stearns.
Crisis in the Congo: The Rise and Fall of Laurent Kabila by François Ngolet is pretty self-explanatory and illustrates well why the issue with Zaire wasn't just Mobutu, though he was particularly incompetent.
Les guerres à l'est de la RD Congo, entre génocide et statocide by Claude Nsal'onanongo Omelenge. This is the best work and most academic, but my French is rusty, so I may be overpraising it. I've had a hard time getting my hands on this one but there are PDFs if you look carefully. If you're in Europe it might be easier.
The Trouble with the Congo by Séverine Autesserre explores why peace efforts have failed.
In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo by Michela Wrong and The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State by Crawford Young and Thomas Edwin Turner explore the damage Mobutu did to the post-colonial Congo (Zaire).
Congo, A Sublime Struggle by Finbarr O'Reilly is more of a personal account, but it has excellent color pictures and you can feel the emotional investment in the topic.
Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba by Madeline Kalb, The Congo Cables by Emmanuel Gerard, and Chief of Station, Congo by Lawerence Devlin explain the Congo Crisis and the role that specifically the US, Belgium, and less directly the UN played in ensuring that the original DRC survived its postcolonial civil war. Carnages: Les guerres secrètes des grandes puissances en Afrique by Pierre Péan covers the francophone vs anglophone meddling in the region.
La guerre civile du Congo-Brazzaville specifically covers the rise of militias, the incentives, the funding, etc. It is a tad outdated in the current conflict—I don't know of a good resource to cover funding of militias today, but I will figure something out.
La première crise congolaise racontée aux Camerounais by Jean Koufan Menkéné is a historiographically good overview of the Congo Crisis (1960-1965) in general.
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa covers The Congo Free State, perhaps the most ironically named country of all time as it covers how the state was the personal property of Leopold II
In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism by J. P. Daughton is quite good and, well, self-explanatory.
Finally, if you're a fan of Adam Curtis (a documentarian, but a propagandist of the greatest order, albeit one I tend to agree with), he has an excellent series called "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace". The final episode covers postcolonial Congo. You can find that here: https://archive.org/details/BBC.All.Watched.Over.by.Machines...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
"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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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
> 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].
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.
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"
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.
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.
...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.
"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'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?
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the WHO announcement: https://www.who.int/news/item/17-05-2026-epidemic-of-ebola-d...
This is our CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/ebola/situation-summary/index.html
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
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
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
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 meddle 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 the violence tearing apart 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 exploited 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. The Congo suffers from a "resource curse", and I'm afraid it will be exploited until long after I die.
EDIT: there are other resources, some better than others.
EDIT2: cleaned up my language a little bit to reflect the seriousness of the topic.
The War That Doesn't Say Its Name, also by Jason Stearns.
Crisis in the Congo: The Rise and Fall of Laurent Kabila by François Ngolet is pretty self-explanatory and illustrates well why the issue with Zaire wasn't just Mobutu, though he was particularly incompetent.
Les guerres à l'est de la RD Congo, entre génocide et statocide by Claude Nsal'onanongo Omelenge. This is the best work and most academic, but my French is rusty, so I may be overpraising it. I've had a hard time getting my hands on this one but there are PDFs if you look carefully. If you're in Europe it might be easier.
The Trouble with the Congo by Séverine Autesserre explores why peace efforts have failed.
In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo by Michela Wrong and The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State by Crawford Young and Thomas Edwin Turner explore the damage Mobutu did to the post-colonial Congo (Zaire).
Congo, A Sublime Struggle by Finbarr O'Reilly is more of a personal account, but it has excellent color pictures and you can feel the emotional investment in the topic.
Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba by Madeline Kalb, The Congo Cables by Emmanuel Gerard, and Chief of Station, Congo by Lawerence Devlin explain the Congo Crisis and the role that specifically the US, Belgium, and less directly the UN played in ensuring that the original DRC survived its postcolonial civil war. Carnages: Les guerres secrètes des grandes puissances en Afrique by Pierre Péan covers the francophone vs anglophone meddling in the region.
La guerre civile du Congo-Brazzaville specifically covers the rise of militias, the incentives, the funding, etc. It is a tad outdated in the current conflict—I don't know of a good resource to cover funding of militias today, but I will figure something out.
La première crise congolaise racontée aux Camerounais by Jean Koufan Menkéné is a historiographically good overview of the Congo Crisis (1960-1965) in general.
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa covers The Congo Free State, perhaps the most ironically named country of all time as it covers how the state was the personal property of Leopold II
In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism by J. P. Daughton is quite good and, well, self-explanatory.
Finally, if you're a fan of Adam Curtis (a documentarian, but a propagandist of the greatest order, albeit one I tend to agree with), he has an excellent series called "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace". The final episode covers postcolonial Congo. You can find that here: https://archive.org/details/BBC.All.Watched.Over.by.Machines...
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
> 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.
>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.
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.
"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/
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
Definitely, but the hantavirus incubation period ranges from 1-8 weeks after exposure.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
If them not fishing means your people are at risk, you go and teach them to fish.
theres also one about pennywise, pound foolish
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.
> 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.
How callously you blame the victims. Remember your humanity.
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.
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
Non-paywalled link: https://apnews.com/article/congo-ebola-uganda-who-africa-eme...
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.
> 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
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.
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"
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.
The IFR for COVID was ~0.1%, about the same as measles.
and that's a whopping over-estimate
Absolutely not.
https://github.com/mbevand/covid19-age-stratified-ifr
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.
> 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.
"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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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...
Didn’t they do this like a decade ago?
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.
adding it to my list of apocalypses to prepare for
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)
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.
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.
Ooops.
Yeah that was not intentional.
"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.
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.
> 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...
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 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
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.
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.
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.