re: NYC doctor has Ebola

quote:

---

I calculated the odds of getting ebola and it was something like 0.000000000011% done by taking all ~11000 cases dividing them by all the people on the planet. 7 billion. or if you want to do so more locally, take all the cases in the US (5? 3?) and divide it by 350 mil. and those are your odds of getting it.

---

Well, to be fair, that isn't how you calculate the odds of getting Ebola. That's how you calculate the odds that you already got Ebola. To calculate the odds of a U.S. citizen getting Ebola, you'd have to have a number of assumptions, including how many people will enter the country with the disease, the number of cases of new infections for each one of those new infections and the effect of health protocols over time on those two numbers (just to name a few).