Ebola: Then and Now - Chris Dye

Director of Strategy, Office of the Director-General. Team Lead, Ebola Epidemiology and Information Management

THEN: In the last week of September 2014, over 900 Ebola cases were reported from West Africa. There weren’t enough hospital beds, and two thirds of patients were dying. Working with uncertain numbers, our challenge was to convey the impending risk to the world, without exaggeration but to stimulate the right action.

NOW: We have had no new cases since 29 October 2015. Now in the second week of November, we are tracking just a single known chain of transmission in Guinea. In the long tail of this Ebola outbreak, with fewer cases and a lot more experience, almost all aspects of data collection and analysis are better than they were one year ago.