Figures
Ebola Cases and Health System Demand in Liberia.
There is considerable uncertainty regarding the steps needed to contain the ongoing Ebola crisis in West Africa, the timeline required to achieve control, and the projected burden of mortality. A new mathematical model of Ebola virus transmission allows assessment of the feedback between new cases and hospital demand under a range of plausible intervention scenarios, including ramping-up of treatment facilities over time and increasing the number of individuals seeking hospital treatment through outreach and education. Results suggest that the outcome of the epidemic depends on both hospital capacity and individual behavior, and the model highlights the conditions under which transmission might have outpaced hospital capacity, and projects possible epidemic trajectories into 2015. See Drake et al.
Image Credit: NIAID, Flickr
Citation: (2015) PLoS Biology Issue Image | Vol. 13(1) January 2015. PLoS Biol 13(1): ev13.i01. https://doi.org/10.1371/image.pbio.v13.i01
Published: January 30, 2015
Copyright: © 2015 . This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
There is considerable uncertainty regarding the steps needed to contain the ongoing Ebola crisis in West Africa, the timeline required to achieve control, and the projected burden of mortality. A new mathematical model of Ebola virus transmission allows assessment of the feedback between new cases and hospital demand under a range of plausible intervention scenarios, including ramping-up of treatment facilities over time and increasing the number of individuals seeking hospital treatment through outreach and education. Results suggest that the outcome of the epidemic depends on both hospital capacity and individual behavior, and the model highlights the conditions under which transmission might have outpaced hospital capacity, and projects possible epidemic trajectories into 2015. See Drake et al.
Image Credit: NIAID, Flickr