Over 5,200 Ebola cases recorded in Congo • Hacker News Board

Re: Over 5,200 Ebola cases recorded in Congo

#81

Post by robk » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 7:17 AM UTC

Der_Einzige wrote: post #41

gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #12

(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 o…

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 beca…

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.

Re: Over 5,200 Ebola cases recorded in Congo

#82

Post by ButlerianJihad » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 7:30 AM UTC

Here is what my friend related to me about respiratory troubles in Africa.

There is a class of poachers, or claim-jumpers as it were, who illegally glean from mines. They do this primarily by scraping and abrading the walls and gleaning the powder or dust that comes off into ores.

Now since this is illegal activity, it's done on the downlow, and obviously it's done by quite poor people without sufficient PPE. So they don't go in there with respirators and masks and HEPA filters. They may have a cloth over their mouth as they scrape over the walls and kick up an underground storm of dust in the dimly lit caverns.

So of course, this dust contains hazardous materials, especially arsenic and other nasty stuff. And the gleaners tend to come down with respiratory ailments. You'd get a chronic cough, shortness of breath, sore throat, and ultimately, coughing up blood. You'd be prone to secondary respiratory infections along the way.

Now if you're a poacher and you get seen in a hospital or clinic, you won't admit that you're conducting illicit activities in mines. That would be rather foolish to out yourself. So you lie to the physicians, and you don't really know how your lungs got this way: must be voodoo, or a witch doctor or curse or something.

So it seems that a lot of allegedly Ebola cases get assigned to these poachers who won't admit that they inhaled arsenic, basically, chronically over the years they've been sneaking into mines at night. But the Ebola bugaboo is powerful, and ubiquitous, and easy to diagnose at arm's length, so basically anyone who comes in presenting with respiratory distress, they're going to pin Ebola on them without a second thought.

I don't know if the foregoing is plausible or true, but I'm just saying, it's not far-fetched based on what I know of medicine the way it is in 2026, and it sure would be a shame if a whole region is getting it all wrong because large gangs of thieves won't own up to their own wrongdoings.

Re: Over 5,200 Ebola cases recorded in Congo

#83

Post by robocat » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 7:43 AM UTC

MarkusQ wrote: post #80

robocat wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> energy That is almost irrelevant. Our immune systems, and environments are mostly security-by-obscurity. Viruses randomly mutate to find vulnerabilities. Their biggest issue is finding solutions using a genetic optimisation algorithm. Their biggest strength is that it is a massively parallel search. Think of 10^x monkeys bashing at all points in their reproduction (maybe 10^18 for peak covid in human hosts).

Viruses don't reproduce by mutation, they reproduce by getting the host to manufacture more copies of the virus, which takes resources (which ultimately come down to energy) away from the host. The "monkeys" aren't trying huge numbers of variations, they are making huge numbers of identical copies with very rare (and usually non-functional) variations when they fail to copy exactly.

The survivorship bias is strong in you.

You're ignoring unsuccessful mutations... But those are the chaos monkeys that really matter!! "on the order of 10¹⁷–10¹⁹ individual nucleotide mutations per month". In part because infectious virions are far fewer than total viral RNA copies.

Which ends up with 2-3 mutations per month in the successful lineage. That's the "rare" number you're thinking of, but mutations are extremely common (as anyone with cancer finds out).

Your "energy" point is just plain wrong. You might carry 100ug of virus when infected - a tiny proportion of your weight. Total mass of virions in humanity at peak might have been 10kg.

See "The total number and mass of SARS-CoV-2 virions" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7685332/

Re: Over 5,200 Ebola cases recorded in Congo

#84

Post by MarkusQ » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 2:38 PM UTC

robocat wrote: post #83

MarkusQ wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Viruses don't reproduce by mutation, they reproduce by getting the host to manufacture more copies of the virus, which takes resources (which ultimately come down to energy) away from the host. The "monkeys" aren't trying huge numbers of variations, they are making huge numbers of identical copies with very rare (and usually non-functional) variations when they fail to copy exactly.

The survivorship bias is strong in you. You're ignoring unsuccessful mutations... But those are the chaos monkeys that really matter!! "on the order of 10¹⁷–10¹⁹ individual nucleotide mutations per month". In part because infectious virions are far fewer than total viral RNA copies. Which ends up with 2-3 mutations per month in the successful lineage. That's the "rare" number you're thinking of, but mutations are ext…

I suspect you aren't reading well. I said:

> ...they are making huge numbers of identical copies with very rare (and usually non-functional) variations...

to which you replied:

> You're ignoring unsuccessful mutations...

You are also conflating absolute numbers with likelihoods; flipping two dozen heads in a row is a rare occurrence (1:2⁻²⁴). Saying that "if everyone on Earth tried it today we'd expect it to happen ~500 times" is not a counter argument.

You're also conflating the substitution rate (rate of mutation rate accumulation in the viral gene pool) with the frequency of copying errors (your "chaos monkeys" metaphor, to which I'm objecting).

Your objection to my statement that viral reproduction consumes resources from the host (which I shorthanded as "energy" since all cellular resources ultimately depend on this) is nonsensical. Who cares about the mass of the viruses?

That's like disputing the claim that "the vandals caused $3 million in property damage" by saying "but they only had $273.15 with them". It's completely irrelevant.

Re: Over 5,200 Ebola cases recorded in Congo

#85

Post by croemer » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 4:17 PM UTC

croemer wrote: post #38

There's a Bayesian forecast from some folks at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine that's useful to see if the outbreak has reached peak size: https://epiforecasts.io/BVDOutbreakSize/stable/analysis#Summ... The last update finally had a growth rate confidence interval straggling 0, meaning the peak seems to be within reach: "The latest growth rate is estimated to be 30% -0.005–0.008" There's a nice fig…

Newest run from 2026-08-25 shows Rt likely above 1 again unfortunately (percentages are confidence intervals): 30% 1.05–1.19, 60% 0.99–1.31, 90% 0.82–1.6. Daily growth rate: 30% 0.005–0.014, 60% -0.001–0.021, 90% -0.013–0.034 per day.