I seem to remember posting early on that the pattern for Obola in the past has been for it to flare up and then, for reasons unknown, die down and go dormant.
Well, if you can believe
the headline at the Drudge Report, that is now happening in Liberia.
MONROVIA, Liberia — The rate of new Ebola infections here has declined so sharply in recent weeks that even some of the busiest treatment facilities are now only half-full and officials are reassessing the scale of the response needed to quell the epidemic.
The turnaround has occurred without the provision of a single treatment bed by the U.S. military, which has promised to build 17 Ebola facilities containing 100 beds each across Liberia. Those treatment units will be constructed, said Bill Berger, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Disaster Assistance Response Team here. But the option of initially opening some with as few as 10 beds is “being discussed,” he said.
That would provide people in all parts of the country access to a nearby treatment unit should they become infected in the months to come. And each facility would be constructed so that it could be quickly expanded to as many as 100 beds if the need arises, he said. The United States has spent $360 million so far fighting Ebola in West Africa.
No one tracking the outbreak is close to declaring the deadly hemorrhagic disease vanquished, and all are wary that the virus, which has receded at times over the past seven months, could suddenly flare again in this impoverished country, the epicenter of the West African Ebola catastrophe.
But five days after the World Health Organization said new infections were declining in Liberia, a 157-bed treatment center in the city of Foya, where the epidemic began seven months ago, held no patients Monday, according to a nurse there. The same facility received no new admissions last Wednesday, the most recent day for which government statistics were available.
Remember, this is the same disease that the experts were computer modeling to be over a million infected by year's end. That does not look like it will happen now.
Again, the mystery that surrounds this disease. No one knows where it hides while dormant. No one knows why it breaks out of its dormancy. No one knows why it returns to its dormancy.
There is, however, a pattern emerging after all of these years and that is that each time it does flare up and break out it infects and kills more people than it did in previous incidents. Why? Again, no one knows.
Is it actually going dormant now? Time will tell, of course. You could ask the CDC but you would get as good an answer with one of those Magic Eightball things.
