FLICKR, CDC GLOBAL
As of April 1, there had been 25,178 Ebola cases—including more than 10,000 deaths—in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). While tragic, these numbers are far lower than the staggering projections put forth earlier last fall year by the WHO Ebola Response Team, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and others—some of which predicted that some 1.4 million people would be infected by the end of January.
“Those predictions proved to be wrong, and it was not only because of the successful intervention in West Africa. It’s also because the methods people were using to make the forecasts were inappropriate,” Aaron King, an associate professor of ecology, evolutionary biology, and mathematics at the University of Michigan, ...
