Concern continues to rise regarding the ongoing Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Two new papers are out that use publicly available data from the region to estimate the early epidemic dynamics (Fisman et al. 2014 and Nishiura and Chowell, 2014). The interesting thing about these two papers is that they use different methodologies but both give essentially the same result. An analysis of the WHO data clearly demonstrates that the outbreaks are steadily growing (the estimates for the effective reproductive number are consistently above 1.0 ). This means that "control" is still a long way off. Several weeks ago the WHO announced that we could see 20,000 people infected which seemed incredibly high. With the results of these two new papers, I think that we can expect that we will easily reach 20,000.

math.epi.lab