The Magic Number That Could End the Ebola Epidemic - Bloomberg
▻http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-26/ebola-s-magic-number-and-the-cost-of-coming-up-short.html
perhaps the most important Ebola number right now is 70 percent. That’s the proportion of patients who need to be isolated — in treatment centers or at least in their homes — in order to put a quick end to the Ebola outbreak, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Once 70 percent of patients are effectively isolated, the outbreak decreases at a rate nearly equal to the initial rate of increase,” researchers wrote today in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. If 70 percent of the current outbreak was achieved by late December, the epidemic “would be almost ended by January 20.”
Seventy percent is a number full of hope and dread. Hope, because it’s a goal that feels attainable; a developed country would be able to handle 70 percent isolation on its own soil in short order. Dread, because in Ebola-swept regions like Liberia and Sierra Leone, we are nowhere near achieving it. Right now, only about 18 percent of Ebola patients in Liberia are being isolated.
