Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases (opens in new tab)

Shit like schools releasing plans ahead of the school year that they then immediately ignore because otherwise they'd have to close in the first two weeks of school, when it was fucking obvious the numbers would be like that around that time, just from looking at the graph and knowing more-or-less how disease spreads. Or "Ok stop masking and open up restaurants wait oh shit it's going up again I thought the tiny dip we saw would continue forever, for no good reason". Just baffling levels of data-illiteracy.

But not a lot of long-term prediction graphs. Who was publishing those?

[EDIT] Wait, I did see total-deaths-at-time-X predictions with/without measures, and with/without vaccination at high rates. That's true.

[EDIT EDIT] Is there a tone issue or is my having seen vanishingly few graphs for all of COVID that tried to predict trends more than a week or two out an outlier experience, and those were in fact extremely common in, perhaps, media I didn't look at? Truly, the main problem I saw locally was an astonishing near-complete failure to consider trends and likely projections, over and over again and often by the same people, who seemed weirdly incapable of learning a very clear lesson, rather than too many projections looking too far out.

But if you're actually interested, you should go and read the papers used for modeling yourself, since the odds of finding a rando on hacker news who is an actual epidemiologists is zilch. The ones who were public communicators that I followed over COVID were the podcast "This Week in Virology" which is just about the best resource you're going to find, and the blog "your local epidemiologist", who is also fantastic

And gain of function research is 1: real 2: fucking insane and 3: a plausible way we would have a true captain trips style pandemic.

A lot of viruses could and become disastrous, but that’s a long shot.

About a 2021 outbreak: "The Ebola virus is known to persist in some survivors, particularly in places where it can lay low from the immune system, such as the testicles or eyeballs. A 2016 study reported resurgence of the virus in a survivor’s seminal fluid more than 500 days after the initial infection.

Still, the more than five-year span was “shocking” to many virologists and public health experts. And it raises a variety of concerns for the many survivors of past outbreaks, some of whom may have had mild cases of Ebola without realizing it. In particular, many people known to have survived Ebola face stigmatization, and the possibility of years-long persistence is likely to amplify that problem."

As far as I have heard, ebola outbreaks are almost exclusively in poor third world areas with generally bad sanitation and cultural practices (such as washing the recently deceased body) that contribute to transmission by contact with infected bodily fluids.

Because multiple members of Doctors Without Borders died in the previous outbreak.

In contrast, the last time the general public has had an issue with a pandemic has been so long ago that deniers and downplayers had an easy game with their bullshit. Had wearing fucking masks not been that politicized, I'd wager a very good portion of the 6.6 million people that died to COVID would still be alive. And to come back to my gay friend, at least in his community there were almost no COVID cases.