I warned you it was going to be a non-event and I was right. The latest count stands at 5,165. That’s out of 14,383 “cases”. That’s far less than the hysterical 80% fatality rate.
But you know what? The real statistics are far, far lower than that: a lot of the deaths were attributed to Ebola but these patients would have died anyway, from harsh living, starvation, the stress of war or sheer poverty.
No-one is monitoring that stat but, unless they do, it’s the placebo-type situation again, where you don’t really know where you stand against the background fatalities. This is a region where background deaths are very high and cannot be ignored.
The number of cases who died of Ebola (if any!) was probably only in the few hundreds. The rest is massaging of figures and deliberate disinformation.
They talk about an epidemic; what epidemic? Less than 15,000 cases and around 5,000 deaths? You’re kidding me…
Every year over a million people die in Africa and elsewhere from malaria. Nobody calls THAT an epidemic. There are no doctors flying in from all over the world to help, no volunteer groups, no emergency measures, no marshal law.
In the USA, every year, the CDC claims there are 36,000 deaths from influenza. EVERY YEAR! Yet nobody panics and starts acting strangely. Why is this not a frightening scenario, if a mere 5,000 on the whole continent of Africa is so alarming?
None of it makes sense.
The Tide Is Ebbing
The weekly number of new cases of Ebola virus disease has started to decline. Cases reported in Liberia, where the trouble started, have fallen back almost to levels before the (non)-epidemic.
On the basis of the analysis of hospital care admissions, laboratory test samples, and collection of dead bodies, an international report informs us that consistent declines of 53% to 73% in each data category occurred after a peak incidence in mid-September.
The number of admissions hit maximum, so far, at 255 patients a week during the week of September 22. Admissions declined 67% to about 70 patients a week during the week of October 26.
Whatever way you cut it, declines are 60 – 70% of former levels.
The current Ebola outbreak (I can’t bring myself to keep typing the word “epidemic”) has been the largest and longest Ebola outbreak in history and the first in West Africa, including Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone.
Liberia has reported the largest number of cases and deaths.
Since it’s all been manufactured, of course it’s the longest! Why go half measures? Make it a good one, if you’re gonna lie.
The improved Liberia situation is detailed in three early-release articles published online November 14 in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
“The recent decrease in cases suggested by these reports shows how important it is to continue to intensify our Ebola response,” said CDC Director Thomas Frieden, MD, MPH. “We have to keep our guard up.”
Who is this guy? In what sense does declining numbers make it important to continue to intensify the Ebola response? Anyone normal (or honest) would say that it’s time we can relax a little, we just need to maintain awareness perhaps, but not continue to “intensify” the response to something that’s already on the way out.
He’s a hysteria-monger, not a cool level-headed scientist.
Liberia reported 2,445 suspected, 1,623 probable, and 2,456 confirmed cases of Ebola to the Liberian Ministry of Health and Social Welfare between March and the end of October.
Care units admitted a total of 4,025 patients, 2,956 (73.5%) of whom officially had Ebola between June 5 and November 8, 2014. For a time a bed shortage was looming but now the system has a total of 697 Ebola beds available countrywide.
Note that “official” cases are meaningless, because the test used (polymerase chain reaction) is simply not capable of diagnosing Ebola accurately—and that’s from the developer of the test himself!
Overall, of a total of 5132 patients with laboratory data available, 2941 (57.3%) tested positive.
With it all dying down, the authorities have now rightly decided to concentrate on marshaling medical care in the remote, hard-to-reach parts of the country, where focal outbreaks will continue to surge for sometime yet.
Meanwhile, the USA should get OUT and stop meddling with figures to create panic and fear.
About Those Flu Deaths
An article by Lawrence Solomon in the Huffington Post earlier this year (Jan 2014) caught my eye and pertains to what I am talking about here: official massaging of figures. You know the old saying: there are lies, damned lies… and statistics!
Solomon writes:
Flu results in “about 250,000 to 500,000 yearly deaths” worldwide, Wikipedia tells us. “The typical estimate is 36,000 [deaths] a year in the United States,” reports NBC, citing the Centers for Disease Control. “Somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000 Canadians a year die of influenza and its related complications, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada,” the Globe and Mail says, adding that “Those numbers are controversial because they are estimates.”
“Controversial” is an understatement, and not just in Canada, and not just because the numbers are estimates. The numbers differ wildly from the sober tallies recorded on death certificates — by law every certificate must show a cause — and reported by the official agencies that collect and keep vital statistics.
According to the National Vital Statistics System in the U.S., for example, annual flu deaths in 2010 amounted to just 500 per year — fewer than deaths from ulcers (2,977), hernias (1,832) and pregnancy and childbirth (825), and a far cry from the big killers such as heart disease (597,689) and cancers (574,743).
The story is similar in Canada, where unlikely killers likewise dwarf Statistics Canada’s count of flu deaths.
Even that 500 figure for the U.S. could be too high, according to analyses in authoritative journals such as the American Journal of Public Health and the British Medical Journal.
Only about 15-20 percent of people who come down with flu-like symptoms have the influenza virus — the other 80-85 percent actually caught rhinovirus or other germs that are indistinguishable from the true flu without laboratory tests, which are rarely done.
In 2001, a year in which death certificates listed 257 Americans as having died of flu, only 18 were positively identified as true flus. The other 239 were simply assumed to be flus and most likely had few true flus among them.
On a page titled Estimating Seasonal Influenza-Associated Deaths in the United States (note that word “estimating”—you thought they were reporting deaths, didn’t you?), the CDC openly admits the CDC does not know exactly how many people die from seasonal flu each year. It’s all just guesswork, smoke and mirrors.
Then this weird statement on that same page: most people who die from seasonal flu-related complications are not tested for flu. What? People who “died of flu complications” were not tested for flu? So how the hell do they know it’s flu? They don’t. They just make it up as they go along.
What’s even more alarming is that parasites kill more people than all the wars in history and far, far more people than viruses ever could! Keep reading the startling facts here…