A reality of its own

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.