8/24/2026 at 9:44:18 AM
(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_outbrea...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola#History
[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/ebola/causes/index.html#heading-xkphh2xy...
[3]: 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-d...
[5]: https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/ebo...
by gucci-on-fleek
8/24/2026 at 9:59:03 AM
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.by biorach
8/24/2026 at 10:50:22 AM
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.
by glenstein
8/24/2026 at 11:47:33 AM
> 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).
by gucci-on-fleek
8/24/2026 at 4:11:22 PM
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)?by paimapi
8/24/2026 at 5:31:56 PM
The faster you kill your host, the less time you have to infect new hosts. Sure, you can loot the host to make a lot of new viruses, but when the host dies, they die too. Ideally, a virus "wants" to make the host live a long, gregarious life, touring the world and kissing babies. But that takes energy away from making more viral payload, so yeah, it's a tradeoff.by MarkusQ
8/25/2026 at 1:56:13 AM
I don't think it's really a tradeoff and rather that Ebola is simply bad at its job. Why? Because it's primarily a bat virus (and it's basically asymptomatic in bats) that ended up where it doesn't belong and wreaks havoc because it hasn't learned to play nice.by im3w1l
8/24/2026 at 11:03:50 AM
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.by mppm
8/25/2026 at 1:02:30 AM
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!by water-data-dude
8/24/2026 at 11:57:13 AM
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, 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.
by phyalow
8/24/2026 at 12:30:44 PM
> Additionally Ebola (Zaire) has previously been shown to be potentially spread via aerosols. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00811Ah, 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.
by gucci-on-fleek
8/24/2026 at 1:57:42 PM
Doesn't Ebola kill faster than transmission can be maximized? I believe Nipah in Asia also faces the same "issue".by fakedang
8/24/2026 at 2:16:59 PM
In general the more severe a virus the less likely it is to spread into a pandemic. This is for a couple reasons: 1) really sick people are less likely to go spread it, 2) really sick people are easier to identify and isolate and 3) the time between virus shedding and death is very small.There are, of course, some exceptions (long incubation periods where you can shed virus but are totally asymptomatic) but those are rare and usually self limiting in some other factor. Smallpox was really the worst possible case and we have thankfully eliminated it.
Big deadly pandemics (black plague level) are usually bacteria.
by colingauvin
8/24/2026 at 4:14:55 PM
>Big deadly pandemics (black plague level) are usually bacteria.that's not really true, is it? I'm thinking small pox and influenza are big ones with well-studied pandemics that had fairly high mortality rates
by paimapi
8/24/2026 at 3:10:54 PM
> Additionally Ebola (Zaire) has previously been shown to be potentially spread via aerosols.…between inoculated pigs and monkeys, in a lab. Pigs infected with this strain, quite notably, do not become hemorrhagic, and as the article notes, manifest as a respiratory illness. So it isn’t fair to point at it and draw conclusions about humans.
Moreover, from the article:
”We have also never observed transmission of EBOV from infected to naive macaques, including in an experiment employing the same cage setting as in the current study, where three NHPs intramuscularly inoculated with EBOV did not transmit the virus to one naive NHP for 28 days, the duration of the protocol.”
They’re literally telling you that the thing you’re fear-mongering about was tested for, and not found to exist.
> the CDC and associated institutions resolutely claim this is not possible, yet also insist on full respirator PPE.
…for people working with late stage infections, in close quarters. Usually with many such cases. This is a case where “better safe than sorry” applies.
by timr
8/24/2026 at 2:55:37 PM
> It is very possible some sorts of lockdowns are implemented.What drives me nuts, and the same thing happened with Covid, is all the things you mentioned are true and yet western countries don't even entertain the possibility of preemptively denying travel from these countries until things get under control. I think the US, Europe, etc. will manage to survive without travel from the DRC et al for an extended period of time. But will governments actually do it? Nah...
by xienze
8/24/2026 at 3:26:46 PM
The US has travel restrictions, therefore you are incorrect that "western countries don't even entertain the possibility of preemptively denying travel from these countries until things get under control"https://www.cdc.gov/ebola/situation-summary/returning-travel...
by thinkcontext
8/24/2026 at 3:32:50 PM
OK, guess I missed that one. Score a point for mean ol' Trump I guess.But, you're ignoring that it's also not exactly a blanket ban on travel from the DRC, just "within the last 21 days", which... does that make a meaningful difference? And, where are the other western countries doing the same? Kinda my point. If it's done at all, it's a day late and a dollar short.
by xienze
8/24/2026 at 4:28:20 PM
I believe that Ebola will kill you a lot faster than 21 days. It's not going to be latent in you for that long.[Edit: Arodex notes that it can remain dormant for years (at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49418182). So, yes, someone could bring it back. It probably wouldn't be an active infection, though. But what is the alternative? Nobody who ever visits the DRC can enter the US ever again? That seems like overkill.]
by AnimalMuppet
8/24/2026 at 9:58:49 AM
Before COVID, I had thought that bushmeat [1] could be the route that spread Ebola to Europe, people smuggle it in their luggage.by rjsw
8/24/2026 at 10:44:25 AM
Were it to spread to Europe, I imagine contact tracing and societal norms would result in a drastically lower r naught and basically make community spread a non-factor.Europeans (at least European health authorities) would hopefully cut down on funeral activities like touching and kissing the bodies of Ebola victims, caring for relatives at home without PPE and sanitation, etc.
African countries face challenges with fighting Ebola, but they sure do make things even harder for themselves with certain practices that are pretty rough even through 19th century germ theory lens.
by alex43578
8/24/2026 at 11:45:13 AM
>Were it to spread to Europe, I imagine contact tracing and societal norms would result in a drastically lower r naught and basically make community spread a non-factor.It depends where in Europe. COVID created or revealed a crazy underbelly in a significant part of the population. And I don't see hospitals keeping up well with an influx of patients requiring very strict isolation protocols against any symptom of bleeding (and there are more people having abnormal bleeding than one imagines, especially with the aging of the population. Now imagine every one of them is a maximum level alarm).
And despite the idea that public health is weak in Africa, African doctors and nurses are better trained and efficient against epidemics that their European counterparts.
by Arodex
8/24/2026 at 10:38:27 AM
> people smuggle it in their luggageReally?
by justin66
8/24/2026 at 10:52:48 AM
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".by alex43578
8/24/2026 at 12:59:13 PM
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.by justin66
8/24/2026 at 1:31:59 PM
Unrefrigerated and in a suitcase is somehow the least-bad part about bushmeat.by alex43578
8/24/2026 at 3:29:19 PM
If you packed it with an ice pack and dry ice to keep that pack cool, it could remain about frozen for the flight.by gosub100
8/24/2026 at 2:59:42 PM
Usually that "taste of home" is part of a cultural ritual or folk medicine which is why you have these high risk smuggling issues. For them, it's a need, not a want.by MisterTea
8/24/2026 at 2:51:38 PM
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.by aworks
8/24/2026 at 11:23:07 AM
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:
by Arodex
8/24/2026 at 1:38:54 PM
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.by quietsegfault
8/24/2026 at 10:29:00 AM
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.
by api
8/24/2026 at 12:18:04 PM
> 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.
by gucci-on-fleek
8/24/2026 at 10:51:38 AM
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.by alex43578
8/24/2026 at 3:16:17 PM
Viral transmission.... Can change........by AtlasBarfed
8/24/2026 at 1:14:11 PM
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-1...
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.
by Der_Einzige
8/24/2026 at 10:15:01 AM
[dead]by redsocksfan45