EBOLA Current Ebola Outbreak at June 2014 Levels, but Spreading Much, Much Faster (Aesop - Raconteur Report)

SageRock

Veteran Member
Posted for fair use and discussion. If I read through the article correctly, the current outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (in a war zone) is about where the 2014 outbreak was in June, 2014, except it appears at this time, the Ebola outbreak is spreading much, much faster than it did in 2014. So we might be facing the equivalent of September/October 2014 in far less than four months, other things being equal (which, of course, they never are).

http://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2018/12/ebola-2018-update-lying-with-statistics.html

Ebola 2018 Update: Lying With Statistics

Monday, December 10, 2018

On more than a few recent occasions this year,
(Why This Is A Problem,
8/16/2018, 8/24/2018, 8/28/2018,
9/15/2018,
10/6/2018, 10/11/2018, 10/28/2018,
11/17/2018)
I've warned you that things in Kivu Province, DRC, aren't going well with respect to Ebola, and the current outbreak.

They still aren't.

(Note that's only 9 posts out of 300 or so in that time span. This is not "The Ebola Blog", nor ever will be. I'm just better - and righter - on it than ABCCNNBCBS combined, nine days out seven. I concede that's a pretty low bar to get over. For reference, I started paying attention to Ebola in 2014 in the spring, and didn't even blog about it at all here until early August 2014, at which point it was over 1000 cases in W.Africa. Note that right now, we aren't but halfway to that point now. I still beat 99.9999% of the MSM to the punch by about 2 months then. In 2014 terms, we are now where we were in June of 2014. In October 2014, it got to the U.S., and we were off to the races. Think about that timeframe long and hard.)

As you'll note at sites like Peter's BRM

https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2018/12/ebola-ok-its-crunch-time.html

or Old NFO's,

https://oldnfo.org/2018/12/10/teh-stoopid-2/

people familiar with math and common sense (and in Peter's case, Africa itself) are beginning to pick up on things. Before they actually get here, and without me pulling the fire alarm.

Read their posts, and then come back; I'll wait.

- - -

So, let's look at that bastion of accuracy, Wikipedia, and see how they're doing covering it.
Oh, surprise! Not well, with respect to Ebola. Just like Kivu. Color me shocked.

Here is their current graph showing time and cases.
(We'll skip the obligatory caveat in Africa of "If they can count past 20 with their shoes on, if they're not lying to save face", etc. etc.)

8TdfcNN.jpg


Seems straightforward, right?
Unfortunate growth of the Ebola outbreak currently, but slow, steady and increasing.
So, where does the "Lying" part of "Lying with statistics" show up?
Look at the x-axis (for Common Core grads, that's the horizontal line) which measures time.
Not quite 150ish days, from 8/12/18 to present, a couple of weeks from Christmas 2018.
Fair enough.
Now look at the y-axis (again, for the Common Core-ons, that'd be the vertical measurement line on the left side). It doesn't show 0-150, like it should if it were an honest graph.
It instead shows you 0-600.

IOW: It's lying to you, to your face, by a factor of 4X.

Here's what is should look like, it if were an honest graph:

rI1wKCF.jpg


Sorry if you can't read it now, but that's because I made the time axis correspond 1:1 to the number-of-people-affected axis, by shrinking the x-axis to 1/4 of the original.
Note how the graph from zero to any point- cases, deaths, whatever - is now far more vertical. In layman's terms, that's a viral outbreak liftoff.
Like a Saturn-V moon rocket.

Here's the same graph, but with the typical r-naught exponential growth of Ebola (of r=2) plotted roughly (inaccuracy due entirely to my freehand crayon-like art skills with Paint) with a bold red line.

zJTQhXk.jpg


Whoopsie. Oh dear! It seems Ebola in Kivu is above that line, substantially.
That means Ebola in Kivu is growing much faster than the unchecked spread would, meaning human activity (stupidity, pre-literacy, unscientific ignorance, the local asswipes burning Ebola Treatment Centers, and hordes of criminal thugs roaming around with AK-47s shooting up medical relief workers, for instance) is causing Ebola to spread there right now more rapidly than simply doing nothing would.

Greeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat.

So, how bad is it, really?
Let me help again, with Paint's crayon:

yaDvmoT.jpg


Holy shit, Batman! The r-naught for deaths isn't 2, it's 4!
For total Ebola cases, it's 6!!
So, Congolese incompetence and international apathy, unchanged since we started telling you about things this year, is spreading the current DRCongo Ebola outbreak at 2-3 times the speed it would progress if people just walked around doing nothing.

Well-played, ****tards.
You're now improving on 2014 by 2-3 orders of magnitude, and we're still only at Stage 10 (out of 34) levels of death and pestilential spread.

2019 is going to get interesting. In a Chinese curse kind of way.

This thing has now hit a large (Butembo: pop. 1M), if isolated, city already.
That's going to pay yuuuuuuge dividends in deaths, momentarily.

And if it gets to Nairobi (pop. 3M)?
One of the largest cities on the continent Nairobi, international air hub Nairobi?
And it jumps the continent?

Start stocking canned goods, water, ammunition, and concertina wire. Again.
Not necessarily in that order.
(And like you should be already, for a gazillion other contingencies.)

Es kommt.
Nochmal.

Merry Christmas.
Posted by Aesop at 12:58 PM
Labels: Class is in session, Ebola
 
Last edited:

fi103r

Veteran Member
Posted for fair use and discussion. If I read through the article correctly, the current outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (in a war zone) is about where the 2014 outbreak was in June, 2014, except it appears at this time, the Ebola outbreak is spreading much, much faster than it did in 2014. So we might be facing the equivalent of September/October 2014 in far less than four months, other things being equal (which, of course, they never are).


http://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2018/12/ebola-2018-update-lying-with-statistics.html

Monday, December 10, 2018

On more than a few recent occasions this year,
(Why This Is A Problem,
8/16/2018, 8/24/2018, 8/28/2018,
9/15/2018,
10/6/2018, 10/11/2018, 10/28/2018,
11/17/2018)
I've warned you that things in Kivu Province, DRC, aren't going well with respect to Ebola, and the current outbreak.

They still aren't.

(Note that's only 9 posts out of 300 or so in that time span. This is not "The Ebola Blog", nor ever will be. I'm just better - and righter - on it than ABCCNNBCBS combined, nine days out seven. I concede that's a pretty low bar to get over. For reference, I started paying attention to Ebola in 2014 in the spring, and didn't even blog about it at all here until early August 2014, at which point it was over 1000 cases in W.Africa. Note that right now, we aren't but halfway to that point now. I still beat 99.9999% of the MSM to the punch by about 2 months then. In 2014 terms, we are now where we were in June of 2014. In October 2014, it got to the U.S., and we were off to the races. Think about that timeframe long and hard.)

As you'll note at sites like Peter's BRM

https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2018/12/ebola-ok-its-crunch-time.html

or Old NFO's,

https://oldnfo.org/2018/12/10/teh-stoopid-2/

people familiar with math and common sense (and in Peter's case, Africa itself) are beginning to pick up on things. Before they actually get here, and without me pulling the fire alarm.

Read their posts, and then come back; I'll wait.

- - -

So, let's look at that bastion of accuracy, Wikipedia, and see how they're doing covering it.
Oh, surprise! Not well, with respect to Ebola. Just like Kivu. Color me shocked.

Here is their current graph showing time and cases.
(We'll skip the obligatory caveat in Africa of "If they can count past 20 with their shoes on, if they're not lying to save face", etc. etc.)

8TdfcNN.jpg


Seems straightforward, right?
Unfortunate growth of the Ebola outbreak currently, but slow, steady and increasing.
So, where does the "Lying" part of "Lying with statistics" show up?
Look at the x-axis (for Common Core grads, that's the horizontal line) which measures time.
Not quite 150ish days, from 8/12/18 to present, a couple of weeks from Christmas 2018.
Fair enough.
Now look at the y-axis (again, for the Common Core-ons, that'd be the vertical measurement line on the left side). It doesn't show 0-150, like it should if it were an honest graph.
It instead shows you 0-600.

IOW: It's lying to you, to your face, by a factor of 4X.

Here's what is should look like, it if were an honest graph:

rI1wKCF.jpg


Sorry if you can't read it now, but that's because I made the time axis correspond 1:1 to the number-of-people-affected axis, by shrinking the x-axis to 1/4 of the original.
Note how the graph from zero to any point- cases, deaths, whatever - is now far more vertical. In layman's terms, that's a viral outbreak liftoff.
Like a Saturn-V moon rocket.

Here's the same graph, but with the typical r-naught exponential growth of Ebola (of r=2) plotted roughly (inaccuracy due entirely to my freehand crayon-like art skills with Paint) with a bold red line.

zJTQhXk.jpg


Whoopsie. Oh dear! It seems Ebola in Kivu is above that line, substantially.
That means Ebola in Kivu is growing much faster than the unchecked spread would, meaning human activity (stupidity, pre-literacy, unscientific ignorance, the local asswipes burning Ebola Treatment Centers, and hordes of criminal thugs roaming around with AK-47s shooting up medical relief workers, for instance) is causing Ebola to spread there right now more rapidly than simply doing nothing would.

Greeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat.

So, how bad is it, really?
Let me help again, with Paint's crayon:

yaDvmoT.jpg


Holy shit, Batman! The r-naught for deaths isn't 2, it's 4!
For total Ebola cases, it's 6!!
So, Congolese incompetence and international apathy, unchanged since we started telling you about things this year, is spreading the current DRCongo Ebola outbreak at 2-3 times the speed it would progress if people just walked around doing nothing.

Well-played, ****tards.
You're now improving on 2014 by 2-3 orders of magnitude, and we're still only at Stage 10 (out of 34) levels of death and pestilential spread.

2019 is going to get interesting. In a Chinese curse kind of way.

This thing has now hit a large (Butembo: pop. 1M), if isolated, city already.
That's going to pay yuuuuuuge dividends in deaths, momentarily.

And if it gets to Nairobi (pop. 3M)?
One of the largest cities on the continent Nairobi, international air hub Nairobi?
And it jumps the continent?

Start stocking canned goods, water, ammunition, and concertina wire. Again.
Not necessarily in that order.
(And like you should be already, for a gazillion other contingencies.)

Es kommt.
Nochmal.

Merry Christmas.
Posted by Aesop at 12:58 PM
Labels: Class is in session, Ebola


Should we be looking at camp/fort fooked again may have to dredge the moat again and blow that fool bridge this time.
 

bw

Fringe Ranger
Now look at the y-axis (again, for the Common Core-ons, that'd be the vertical measurement line on the left side). It doesn't show 0-150, like it should if it were an honest graph. It instead shows you 0-600.

I fail to see why the X and Y axis should have the same range.
 

night driver

ESFP adrift in INTJ sea
It really doesn't matter here because all he did was take the original exponential growth and make it more apparent.

Using the original graph, we come to essentially the same conclusion, that is, this is progressing like any unchecked viral outbreak... It's exponential. Like all the others. Diff here is that the exponent may not be "2" but a higher number. Give me a few weeks (oh 2-3) and run the numbers again and we can see just how big the exponent IS. Would rather that we stay parabolic than go hyperbolic, thanks.


Aesop SOMETIMES gets a tad full of himself. Doesn't mean I don't read him with baited breath. (No that isn't a misspelling. I don't mean "(a)bated breath", I actually DO mean "Baited" here.)
 

Hognutz

Has No Life - Lives on TB
Ebola-chan has plenty of host. Afrikaans is overpopulated and Ebola-chan just seems to rectify past mistakes...

Merry Christmas!
 

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SageRock

Veteran Member
I fail to see why the X and Y axis should have the same range.

The X axis is days, and the Y axis is cases. Aesop wants to draw a line showing the relationship of cases/days, or the rate of spread. Therefore, the line should be drawn on a graph where the proportion of cases and days are shown in equal increments along the two axes -- otherwise, there is distortion. In the case of the original Wikipedia graph, the distortion makes it appears that the rate of spread is much slower, since the number of days is quite "stretched out" relative to the number of cases.

In case it is not clear from the above, it is cumulative number of cases and cumulative number of days.
 
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night driver

ESFP adrift in INTJ sea
either way, it's still parabolic, which, at the current juncture, means that in not a LOT of days it's going to be REAL DAMN SCARY if we're LUCKY. Considering that this is another "Africa wins." scenario, well, there ain't any reason NOT to panic early and avoid the rush. Just go ahead and panic NOW, and that way in a day or two you'll have all THAT out of your system so you can respond and function with a clear head,
 

bw

Fringe Ranger
The X axis is days, and the Y axis is cases. Aesop wants to draw a line showing the relationship of cases/days, or the rate of spread. Therefore, the line should be drawn on a graph where the proportion of cases and days are shown in equal increments along the two axes -- otherwise, there is distortion. In the case of the original Wikipedia graph, the distortion makes it appears that the rate of spread is much slower, since the number of days is quite "stretched out" relative to the number of cases.

Sorry, it's a nonproblem. The time axis could be days, hours, fortnights or years with equal accuracy. In charting all you need is units that cover the range of cases reasonably well, and you need to show the scale. For "honest" charts the most important consideration is that all axes be zero-based. Linear or log is left up to the viewer.

I would have replied at more length initially, but it was 2 minutes to 4pm, when my wife and I share wine, cheese and philosophical discussions. We typically cover the ways of the world, the evils of mankind, and solve the problems of the universe. All taken care of, thanks for asking.

I don't follow this Aesop person, but based on this brief exposure I feel confident in asserting that he/she is a total nincompoop and I don't intend to follow it in the future.
 

Dozdoats

On TB every waking moment
Ain't skeered. If SMOD doesn't make it, Ebola-chan will help chlorinate the gene pool adequately.

So pull up the drawbridge and dump the pirhanha in the moat and let 'er rip ...
 

Kris Gandillon

The Other Curmudgeon
_______________
I've got a folder on my computer full of such graphs done as we followed the 2014 Ebola outbreak.

Yea it was "scary" for a while. Until it wasn't.

Not going to get wrapped around the axle this time...yet.

Will keep an occasional eye on it in case it travels further, gets hotter or stays longer.
 
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