medical alert
Ebola could infect 1.4 million people by Jan. 20
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released more bad news about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa on Tuesday. If the disease continues on its current path, the CDC warned, it could infect as many as 1.4 million people by Jan. 20.
The announcement comes a day after the World Health Organization announced that Ebola cases could triple to 20,000 by November, unless there are "drastic improvements in control measures." In its announcement Tuesday, the CDC said that in the worst possible situation, Liberia and Sierra Leone could see 21,000 Ebola cases by Sept. 30 and 1.4 million Ebola cases by Jan. 20. In a best-case scenario, meanwhile, the outbreak would be "almost ended" in Sierra Leone and Liberia by Jan. 20, according to the report.
The CDC used computer modeling to reach the estimates, considering the fact that many Ebola cases can go undetected. The CDC didn't include estimates for Ebola infections in Guinea because "case counts there have gone up and down in ways that cannot be reliably modeled," according to The New York Times.
The WHO estimates that the current Ebola outbreak includes 5,843 infections and 2,803 deaths.