Ebola - a simple matter of logic

Consider these points:

- Viruses live to reproduce and spread. They will do this until they either exhaust the herd of available hosts. At that point they burn themselves out.

- The size of the herd available to viruses can be controlled using quarantines or vaccines.

- Quarantine is simply the process of limited the available herd of hosts. The ease of creating a quarantine depends very much on the characteristics of the virus. For viruses like HIV it is extremely easy as it is not very contagious (transfer of blood or sexual fluids). Viruses like flu are more challenging because they are very contagious, but vaccines are often available and because they have a very low mortality rate it is not such a big deal if people get them. Good sanitation and hygiene can also be useful barriers to create effective quarantines for many viruses.

- The longer the incubation period of a virus, the harder it is to create an effective quarantine.

I think we can all agree on this, so far, right?

Okay, so now we come to Ebola:

- There is no vaccine, so that can't be used to limit the herd.

- It appears that this strain, at least, is extremely contagious.

- It has a very long, 21 day, incubation.

Quite obviously containment in the original outbreak areas has failed, and quite obviously it is impossible to effectively physically quarantine places now that the virus has already been spread internationally. We could seal the borders, but it would be useless as there are almost certainly infected people, in incubation, all over the planet.


So, this is my point; any virus only gets beaten because of the herd of potential hosts being limited. Whether that is through physical quarantine measures (including hygiene barriers), vaccines, or because the virus isn't very contagious so it can't spread quick enough before its hosts succumb or beat it.

With Ebola, non of these retarding factors are in play. So logic dictates that it will keep spreading until it has used up all of the available herd. Or am I missing something?


ps. as for mutations, sure it will mutate, but will it mutate quickly into a benign form if it is doing just fine (from a virus' point-of-view) as it is?