Abstract
In September 2014, the CDC published a supplement to the MMWR that announced a worst-case estimate of 1.4 million cases of Ebola in Liberia and Sierra Leone (Meltzer et al., MMWR 63(3):1–14, 2014, [1]). The epidemic was then 6 months old and 8,000 cases had been reported. It was estimated that at least 2.5 times that many had occurred, and the 1.4 million was based on the then estimated incidence of 21,000 cases in 6 months. The method was mathematically simple—based primarily on mean incubation period, contact index, and specific sets of patient circumstances—but the details were complicated.
But however small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind—put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still.
–Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1929
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Rothenberg, R. (2016). A Reality of Its Own. In: Chowell, G., Hyman, J. (eds) Mathematical and Statistical Modeling for Emerging and Re-emerging Infectious Diseases. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40413-4_1
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