CDC’s Ebola Forecast Looks Too Far Into Future to Be Useful
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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s forecast that Ebola may strike 1.4 million people in Sierra Leone and Liberia by January looks too far into the future to be a meaningful prediction, health officials said.
The virus that has so far infected 5,843 people may cause 550,000 to 1.4 million infections in those countries by Jan. 20 if no action is taken to curb the epidemic in West Africa, the Atlanta-based CDC said in a report yesterday. Earlier, researchers from the World Health Organization and Imperial College London predicted the epidemic may exceed 20,000 cases by Nov. 2, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.