Ebola Spreading: Infections Up 800% In Last Week: Officials Race To Track Down 400 Possible Contacts
Last week three suspected Ebola infections were detected in a remote region of the Congo. Since then, World Health Organization officials have been scrambling to contain the virus.
Their efforts appear to have failed.
The contagion continues to spread, and though it’s nowhere near the 11,000 people who were infected during the outbreak in 2014, the infection rate has spiked over 800% in just the last seven days, with at least nine new cases reported in the last 24 hours:
The 2014 outbreak likewise started in a remote region of Africa, but containment efforts were ineffective and the virus eventually spread to the United States and Europe.
***
According to W.H.O., about 400 people have come into contact with the 29 people infected and officials are attempting to track them down for monitoring.
As we learned in 2014, all it takes is one infected individual to make it through an airport checkpoint.
With international travel via airports, trains and cars available throughout the region, a single infected individual on an airplane could infect scores of others, who in turn could infect scores more.
The following Ebola model from Yaneer Bar-Yam, who has successfully simulated and predicted such events as the rise of the Arab Spring, shows how an Ebola contagion may look.
The above model is based on Ebola’s current infection rates and doesn’t take into account its possible evolution as it spreads from human-to-human.
According to scientists, the 2014 strain began hyper evolving, to the point that had it not been contained and continued to spread through human contact, it could have gone airborne, making it as easy to catch as a common cold.
In response to this unprecedented threat, US government officials began preparing for mass casualties, reportedly going so far as to develop plans for Community Care Centers where infected individuals, or those suspected of infections, would be detained indefinitely.
As the Ebola contagion spread across the globe, the panicked populace rushed to stockpile emergency supplies like freeze dried foods, bio-protective body suits and gas masks.
The concern, of course, was that a virus with a 90% fatality rate after infection would make its way to local American communities. As Tess Pennington notes in her Pandemic Preparedness Guide, once it’s within 50 miles of where you live, it’s time to worry and take immediate steps to isolate your family from the threat, because most people won’t realize how serious of a situation they are in:
Perhaps containment procedures being implemented in the Congo by W.H.O. will be more effective this time around than they were in 2014.
But what if they’re not? What if the virus mutates and goes airborne?
Plan accordingly.
Related:
Copyright Information: Copyright SHTFplan and Mac Slavo. This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.shtfplan.com. Please contact us for permission to reproduce this content in other media formats.
|
0 comments:
Post a Comment