Stopping (October 20, 2014)
Well, there has been no news for 3 days of new "Ebola Scares" as they've come to be known. On Friday, AP said they would no longer move stories about Ebola Scares, because "Often the fact of an unconfirmed case isn’t worth a story at all. On several occasions already, in the U.S. and abroad, we have decided not to report suspected cases. We’ve just stayed in touch with authorities to monitor the situation." In other words, the AP has decided that we don't need to know. Because they are, in essence, suppressing these stories, I suspect it is going to become very hard to build and maintain data about them. It was fun while it lasted. If I see stories, I may come back and update the list, but don't hold your breath. Well, unless you find yourself in the same room as somebody with Ebola...
Overview
This is a list of suspected Ebola cases outside the West African Hot Zone. My intent in maintaining this list is not to be alarming, nor to be calming. I just want a collection of the information available. The counts and test results here are based on news reports. I have not collated all of the test results, as sometimes I don't see the reports. I'll try to keep this up-to-date as I come across information, but I do have a day job, so this could fall out of date.
Note, when I say "Unknown" in this table, I don't necessarily mean that nobody knows. I mean that I haven't seen a report one way or the other.
Lessons Learned
One of the things I have learned while trying to maintain this list is that journalists are really awful at making it easy to correlate one story to the next in a precise manner, and Indian journalists in particular are terrible about following up. Only one of the Indian incidents as of 9/24/2014 had any follow up as to the condition and test results of the patient - Alip Das. Because of this, I'm going to have to set some rules for myself as to when it's okay to presume a patient is negative under the notion that "no news is good news." I'm thinking that a full week is probably reasonable if the original story suggested they were getting testing, and three full weeks otherwise.
Another conclusion I've drawn is that hospitals can not let down their guard, and must train their staff to write down and read all information provided by incoming patients, even though there will be a lot of false positives. This list contains 152 people as I write this, with 74 positive cases. That's a roughly 2:1 ratio. If we discard the auxiliary outbreak in DR Congo, we get 78 people and 3 positive cases, or a 26:1 ratio. The problem with a ratio like that is that it breeds complacency. It's not difficult to believe that the Dallas hospital let down their guard - prior to Duncan, the ratio was even higher, and there had been zero positive cases in the US. And that complacency led to Duncan being sent home with antibiotics.
Please Help
I have a day job as a programmer. I spend breaks on maintaining this list, but ultimately it has become too much for one person to hope to track accurately. I do my best, but I could really use some help. To that end, I have set up a project at github. Github is a site centered around using git to collaborate on files (typically, source code). In this case, I've set up the incident database as a JSON document which is fairly easy to edit in any old text editor. If you see an error or omission, please submit an issue there, or better yet, use git to edit the json file and submit a pull request. The source code for the statistics generation is in that repository, too.
The List of "Uncontrolled" cases.
This list only includes "uncontrolled" cases - ones where the person became suspected or confirmed of having Ebola outside of the West African nations already in the hot zone. Patients listed "deceased-suspected" are not included in the total deceased until it is confirmed they died of Ebola.
† - Patients in DR Congo are left out of the statistics, because that was a separate outbreak altogether, and appears to be under control.Legend:
- suspected
- negative
- total patients
- positive
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Additional Ebola Information:
- Ebola transmitted via semen up to 7 weeks after recovery. [source:WHO]
"Men who have recovered from the disease can still transmit the virus through their semen for up to 7 weeks after recovery from illness." - Incubation Period up to 21 days [source:WHO]
"The incubation period, that is, the time interval from infection with the virus to onset of symptoms, is 2 to 21 days." - Whole Blood of Recovering Patients May Reduce Fatality Rate to 12.5% [source: Journal of Infectious Diseases]
"The 8 transfused patients had clinical symptoms similar to those of other EBO patients seen during the epidemic. All were seriously ill with severe asthenia, 4 presented with hemorrhagic manifestations, and 2 became comatose as their disease progressed. Only 1 transfused patient (12.5%) died" - Ebola Health Map [source: HealthMap.org] Fantastic resource covering the 2014 Ebola Hot Zone
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