6 ms·

(Originally posted as a reply to a dead comment) While there was some controversy regarding how COVID spreads in the early days (droplets vs aerosol, how many

(Originally posted as a reply to a dead comment) While there was some controversy regarding how COVID spreads in the early days (droplets vs aerosol, how many virions you needed to be exposed to to become infected, whether asymptomatic transmission was possible, etc.), most of the details were fairly well understood within a year after the pandemic started. Plus, we were already aware that coronaviruses are capable of spreading via the air and causing mass outbreaks [0], so even at the very beginning I doubt that many experts would have claimed that it was impossible for COVID-19 to cause a pandemic. However, Ebola has been around for 50 years now [1], so we have a pretty good idea how it works. And every source that I've read says that it spreads exclusively through direct fluid contact with someone who is symptomatic [2] [3] [4] [5], and so does every other virus in the same family [6], so it seems almost impossible for Ebola to cause the same type of worldwide outbreak that COVID-19 did. (I'm not claiming that Ebola will never spread to North America/Europe, or that an outbreak won't spread to and kill lots of people in Africa, just that it should spread much slower than COVID-19 and that it should be much easier to prevent its transmission.) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002%E2%80%932004_SARS_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002%E2%80%932004_SARS_outbrea... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola#History [2]: https://www.cdc.gov/ebola/causes/index.html#heading-xkphh2xybz https://www.cdc.gov/ebola/causes/index.html#heading-xkphh2xy... [3]: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ebola-disease#:~:text=Transmission https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ebola-disea... [4]: https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2026/05/18/what-is-ebola-and-how-does-it-spread/#:~:text=How%20does%20Ebola%20spread https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2026/05/18/what-is-ebola-and-how-d... [5]: https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/ebola/prevention-ebola.html#a1 https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/ebo... [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filoviridae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filoviridae

rjsw 2mo ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushmeat
- justin66 2mo ago
  > people smuggle it in their luggage Really?
  - alex43578 2mo ago
    Yeah. There's a reason why customs is so strict about the sloppy importation of food: it's host to diseases and pests, capable of causing ridiculous damage because someone has to have that "taste of home".
    - justin66 2mo ago
      It’s the fact or otherwise of someone having carried raw meat in their luggage that I’m questioning, not the fact of customs officials caring about food moving across international borders. I’ve had fruit confiscated at a border, but meat in luggage seems like… a different paradigm.
      - deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
      - alex43578 2mo ago
        Unrefrigerated and in a suitcase is somehow the least-bad part about bushmeat.
      - gosub100 2mo ago
        If you packed it with an ice pack and dry ice to keep that pack cool, it could remain about frozen for the flight.
    - aworks 2mo ago
      Which reminds me of being at the SFO baggage claim. A security dog went straight for a person's bag. The security officer opened it up and found an old, stale sandwich. The person said they had forgotten their mother had stashed it there.
    - MisterTea 2mo ago
biorach 2mo ago
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.
- glenstein 2mo ago
  Well they did just say it was in reply to a dead comment, so I suspect that was one person entertaining the possibility of widespread transmission, and there's already at least one more comment here if not two (depending how you interpret them) entertaining the possibility of mutation that leads to easier transmission. Maybe the "worth listening to" caveat is intending to dismiss those, but I certainly don't think it's the case that nobody is suggesting it or that it's not worth pushing back against.
- gucci-on-fleek 2mo ago
  > No one worth listening to is claiming that there will be a COVID-style pandemic. When I first posted this, all 4 top-level comments were dead, and half of them suggested that this Ebola outbreak would be similar to COVID-19. I agree that they're probably not worth listening to, but I still think that it's worth refuting them, since the media is generally not doing a great job explaining how Ebola is different from COVID-19. > The concern here is the very high mortality rate. Oh yeah, I definitely agree that this is concerning, but concerning in the sense that something absolutely horrible is happening in the world, and not in the sense that I could wake up tomorrow sick with Ebola (like some other comments were implying).
  - paimapi 2mo ago
    this is more of a curiosity and not pushback but are there mechanistic reasons why viral mutations are subjected to tradeoffs in terms of lethality vs infectiousness? is it that the more lethal it is, the earlier it is that people become symptomatic (and thus are far more likely to isolate and/or be immobile)?
    - 2mo ago
redsocksfan45 2mo ago
[dead]
api 2mo ago
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.
- alex43578 2mo ago
  There's a genetic continent between hemorrhagic fever and coronavirus, and I'd be far more worried about something like MERS or another already-respiratory virus breaking out than Ebola.
- gucci-on-fleek 2mo ago
  > True right now, but what happens if it mutates? There are more than a dozen viruses in the same family as Ebola, each of which have various strains, and none of them have airborne spread. Also, this family has been around for over 1k years [0], and any mutation allowing for airborne spread would be heavily selected for, which suggests that it's probably not "easy" (in the sense that it would only require a very small number of mutations) for the virus to acquire this trait. That being said, evolution is messy and probabilistic, so it's certainly possible for this to happen (especially considering the high AIDS prevalence in Africa, which increases the risk of recombination), but the odds of this are so low that I wouldn't worry about it. Another novel coronavirus or influenza strain would probably be my biggest worry. [0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9151191/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9151191/
mppm 2mo ago
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.
- water-data-dude 2mo ago
  I read that book when I was probably way too young for it, and that incident made me spend a lot of time staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night. I'll have to dig into it more!
Arodex 2mo ago
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 https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/w3ct1yvq
phyalow 2mo ago
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 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.
- gucci-on-fleek 2mo ago
  > Additionally Ebola (Zaire) has previously been shown to be potentially spread via aerosols. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00811 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00811 Ah, I was not aware of this, so thanks for pointing that out. That does indeed look quite concerning, so let's hope that that won't apply to humans (although I'm struggling to think of a plausible biological reason for why it wouldn't). > 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. I agree that this is bad in the sense that something absolutely horrific is happening to a lot of people; I was just trying to refute the point that we could also somehow wake up with Ebola a month from now.
Der_Einzige 2mo ago
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-19.html https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/04/feces-covid-1... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7464151/ 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.
- robk 2mo ago
  are you claiming that people who have a smelly asshole are spreading it that way? I think it’s more around if there’s feces on the hands, but wiping your ass and washing your hands afterwards shouldn’t be a problem.
quietsegfault 2mo ago
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.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
AtlasBarfed 2mo ago
Viral transmission.... Can change........

rjsw 2mo ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushmeat

justin66 2mo ago
> people smuggle it in their luggage Really?
- alex43578 2mo ago
  Yeah. There's a reason why customs is so strict about the sloppy importation of food: it's host to diseases and pests, capable of causing ridiculous damage because someone has to have that "taste of home".
  - justin66 2mo ago
    It’s the fact or otherwise of someone having carried raw meat in their luggage that I’m questioning, not the fact of customs officials caring about food moving across international borders. I’ve had fruit confiscated at a border, but meat in luggage seems like… a different paradigm.
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    - alex43578 2mo ago
      Unrefrigerated and in a suitcase is somehow the least-bad part about bushmeat.
    - gosub100 2mo ago
      If you packed it with an ice pack and dry ice to keep that pack cool, it could remain about frozen for the flight.
  - aworks 2mo ago
    Which reminds me of being at the SFO baggage claim. A security dog went straight for a person's bag. The security officer opened it up and found an old, stale sandwich. The person said they had forgotten their mother had stashed it there.
  - MisterTea 2mo ago

biorach 2mo ago

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.

glenstein 2mo ago
Well they did just say it was in reply to a dead comment, so I suspect that was one person entertaining the possibility of widespread transmission, and there's already at least one more comment here if not two (depending how you interpret them) entertaining the possibility of mutation that leads to easier transmission. Maybe the "worth listening to" caveat is intending to dismiss those, but I certainly don't think it's the case that nobody is suggesting it or that it's not worth pushing back against.
gucci-on-fleek 2mo ago
> No one worth listening to is claiming that there will be a COVID-style pandemic. When I first posted this, all 4 top-level comments were dead, and half of them suggested that this Ebola outbreak would be similar to COVID-19. I agree that they're probably not worth listening to, but I still think that it's worth refuting them, since the media is generally not doing a great job explaining how Ebola is different from COVID-19. > The concern here is the very high mortality rate. Oh yeah, I definitely agree that this is concerning, but concerning in the sense that something absolutely horrible is happening in the world, and not in the sense that I could wake up tomorrow sick with Ebola (like some other comments were implying).
- paimapi 2mo ago
  this is more of a curiosity and not pushback but are there mechanistic reasons why viral mutations are subjected to tradeoffs in terms of lethality vs infectiousness? is it that the more lethal it is, the earlier it is that people become symptomatic (and thus are far more likely to isolate and/or be immobile)?
  - 2mo ago

redsocksfan45 2mo ago

[dead]

api 2mo ago

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.

alex43578 2mo ago
There's a genetic continent between hemorrhagic fever and coronavirus, and I'd be far more worried about something like MERS or another already-respiratory virus breaking out than Ebola.
gucci-on-fleek 2mo ago
> True right now, but what happens if it mutates? There are more than a dozen viruses in the same family as Ebola, each of which have various strains, and none of them have airborne spread. Also, this family has been around for over 1k years [0], and any mutation allowing for airborne spread would be heavily selected for, which suggests that it's probably not "easy" (in the sense that it would only require a very small number of mutations) for the virus to acquire this trait. That being said, evolution is messy and probabilistic, so it's certainly possible for this to happen (especially considering the high AIDS prevalence in Africa, which increases the risk of recombination), but the odds of this are so low that I wouldn't worry about it. Another novel coronavirus or influenza strain would probably be my biggest worry. [0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9151191/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9151191/

mppm 2mo ago

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.

water-data-dude 2mo ago
I read that book when I was probably way too young for it, and that incident made me spend a lot of time staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night. I'll have to dig into it more!

Arodex 2mo ago

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

phyalow 2mo ago

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 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.

gucci-on-fleek 2mo ago
> Additionally Ebola (Zaire) has previously been shown to be potentially spread via aerosols. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00811 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00811 Ah, I was not aware of this, so thanks for pointing that out. That does indeed look quite concerning, so let's hope that that won't apply to humans (although I'm struggling to think of a plausible biological reason for why it wouldn't). > 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. I agree that this is bad in the sense that something absolutely horrific is happening to a lot of people; I was just trying to refute the point that we could also somehow wake up with Ebola a month from now.

Der_Einzige 2mo ago

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-19.html https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/04/feces-covid-1... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7464151/ 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.

robk 2mo ago
are you claiming that people who have a smelly asshole are spreading it that way? I think it’s more around if there’s feces on the hands, but wiping your ass and washing your hands afterwards shouldn’t be a problem.

quietsegfault 2mo ago

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.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

AtlasBarfed 2mo ago

Viral transmission.... Can change........