Even if the 1.4 million estimate was just a scenario, it still implied a
baseline: if nothing had changed, that is what would have happened.
During the 2013–2016 epidemic, almost 30,000 cases of Ebola were
reported across Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Did the
introduction of control measures by Western health agencies really
prevent over 1.3 million cases?[67]
In the field of public health, people often refer to disease control
measures as ‘removing the pumphandle.’ It’s a nod to John Snow’s
work on cholera, and the removal of the handle on the Broad Street
pump. There’s just one problem with this phrase: when the
pumphandle came off on 8 September 1854, London’s cholera
outbreak was already well in decline. Most of the people at risk had
either caught the infection already, or fled the area. If we’re being
accurate, ‘removing the pumphandle’ should really refer to a control
measure that’s useful in theory, but delivered too late.
Soho cholera outbreak, 1854By the time some of the largest Ebola treatment centres opened in
late 2014, the outbreak was already slowing down, if not declining
altogether.[68] Yet in some areas, control measures did coincide with
a fall in cases. It’s therefore tricky to untangle the exact impact of
these measures. Response teams often introduced several measures