With Ebola making its way to the United States, people are rushing to find more information on the deadly disease.
The Centers for Disease Control released a new chart on how contagious Ebola is compared to other diseases. The results may surprise you, according to IJReview.
What you’re seeing is an evaluation of how contagious the Ebola virus actually is compared to previous epidemics, namely: Hepatitis C, HIV, SARS, Mumps, and Measles.
As Michaeleen Doucleff reported, these little icons of pink and red people reflect the disease’s relative R0 or R(nought) scores. The red person is the disease carrier, and the pink people are those one carrier typically infects.
The disease turns out to be less contagious than many others. However, it is also more deadly.
Ebola sits between 1.5 and 2.0, not a particularly effective transmitter, but pretty deadly once there is an infection. The World Health Organization estimates Ebola’s fatality rate at an average of 50% – with a wide variance of 20% to 90% depending on the outbreak.
