No one worth listening to is claiming that there will be a COVID-style pandemic. The concern here is the very high mortality rate. Granted the transmission rate is low, but in countries where facilities and health-care workers are scarce this disease is still capable of being a real problem.

The caveats to your comment are in my opinion as follows: Bundibugyo the current strain has not previously been responsible for material outbreaks, as such it has therefore received significantly less scientific attention.

Additionally Ebola (Zaire) has previously been shown to be potentially spread via aerosols. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00811, the CDC and associated institutions resolutely claim this is not possible, yet also insist on full respirator PPE. For any institution to claim we know much about this strain isnt true. An alarming fact to update ones prior is the current size of the outbreak and its rapid development compared to ALL previous outbreaks (yes conditions on the ground maybe confounding this), but the scientific approach would be to say, we simply do not have enough evidence to make any claims of significance.

I am quite worried about the potential for this situation in the DRC (a country of ~116m people, ~55% rural) to 1) not burn itself out, 2) act as a smouldering viral reservoir where occasional spillovers occur to the western hemisphere.

2) Is interesting politically for Western countries, because even if a mass pandemic DOES NOT occur (this is my base case), the pressure of containing a handful of regularly appearing and likely high profile Ebola cases by public health authorities will be acutely felt politically and socially. It is very possible some sorts of lockdowns are implemented. Yes vaccines are in development, yes rapid antigen testing is possible. But this is no Covid, 50%+ CFR is a totally different beast! I think this is potentially close to some sort of worst case scenario from a social and political perspective even if the public health impact IS limited.

Note to self and others who have read Richard Preston's "Hot Zone": The 1989 Reston (US) incident was NOT caused by a single-base mutation of Ebola, but by a distinct monkey virus. Preston seems to have made that up to dramatize events.

Before COVID, I had thought that bushmeat [1] could be the route that spread Ebola to Europe, people smuggle it in their luggage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushmeat

One big risk with Ebola is how the dead are handled in some parts of Africa. I understand the dead are cared for at home by family members which increases the risk of exposure. In western countries, death care is far more formalized with exposure protections, so Ebola is much less likely to spread as it does in other countries without that formalized care.

True right now, but what happens if it mutates?

A few thousand is nowhere close to pandemic but it's enough to give the virus many opportunities to evolve against its new environment.

On the plus side, most viruses become less deadly as they adapt to their host. COVID luckily did this, it seems. If Ebola does this it'll become like the flu, but we don't want yet another flu-level disease circulating.

Ebola is known for 50 years, and yet we still discover new facts about it, thanks to PCR and genetic analysis.

It was only in 2021 that we discovered that ebola can remain dormant for years in former patients and restart infecting:

https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/w3ct1yvq

Despite the supposed "knowledge of how COVID spreads" the following did not happen during covid:

1. Mass movement of classrooms/education to the outdoors in climates where this was possible, despite the outdoors being an excellent way to reduce exposure to an airborne pathogen.

2. Mass campaigns to deploy air purification devices/filtration and modernize existing HVAC. Air quality is often garbage anyway indoors because of bad hygiene from people and natural pollutants. Slapping an air filter to a box fan is an extremely cheap and effective (if loud) solution!!!! We had no excuses for not having government money spent here. It'd also make these stupid wildfires much easier for most to deal with, and as a bonus reduce every respitory related negative externality there is.

3. Educating people that something as simple as cracking/opening your windows while driving is effective at circulating air such that you can massively reduce your chance of transmitting COVID.

But what did we get instead? Masking mandates - leading to a massive amount of physical pollution in landfills, political radicalization against left-wing movements, a whole lot of annoyed glasses wearers, etc. Lots of cloth masks which ultimately worked poorly and lead to economic boom-bust cycles in a core medical commodity in an already fucked supply chain. Lots of fake N-95s, leading to worse QC across the industry which still plagues it today.

We also got insane "6 feet" requirements that did nothing to rescue people from extremely poorly ventilated/purified environments which made mass spread of the virus in places like schools inevitable.

I will never forgive the public for how stupid they are when it comes to anything involving air quality. We have learned basically nothing except about mRNA (which is awesome) and about how much we hated democracy from the stupid boomer flu.

P.S: Bonus, the fact that Americans don't wash their assholes after using the bathroom (no bidet culture like in Asia) means that we unironically are spreading it all anyway by being around others indoors:

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/04/feces-covid-1...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7464151/

America should have had a mass campaign to put bidets on every toilet nation wide in the 50s. Let's do it now.

People on the street, so to speak, don't know better even in advanced nations with strong educational systems. Look how much rejection of vaccination there is in spite of "knowing better". In many African nations there is very reasonable suspicion of European authorities - as there is a long history of abuse and degradation that has moreover been weaponized politically kn the post colonial era. The solution is trustworthy and pedagogical people on the ground doing a lot of hard work and that requires lots of institutional support.

> But these days we do know better and to still insist on rituals that lead to the spreading ...

Thus explaining why RFK has his current position.

>I chide the people in Africa for not following up on best health practices as far as Ebola victims are concerned

God, how can you say that with a straight face after the "ritualistic" response people in the West had during COVID? Fighting against wearing masks, having their mind break because they couldn't go drink in bars, going crazy for snake oil solutions and destroying public health care.

We have had in almost every western country politicians and executives asking to lift any restrictions "because we all die one day anyway, we shouldn't be afraid, get back to work".

How many decades have we been helping Africa for, and for what?