Researchers said that even if the infection rate is still high in Liberia, the Ebola epidemic in Liberia can be ended by June this year. This will happen only if the supportive care and monitoring will continue until then.
The study was published in the journal PLS Biology and researchers looked into the factors that affect Ebola infection rate such as the location of infection, treatment, development of hospital competencies and implementation of safe burial practices.
The researchers developed a computer model that has projected an insight on the Ebola journey. It revealed that Ebola infections in Liberia could be contained by June 2015. John Drake, professor at the Odum School of Ecology at the University of Georgia and lead author of the report, said that the study went deeper into how the different interventions geared towards battling the virus have affected the transmission of the potentially deadly virus.
"We developed a computer model and our initial aim was to estimate the level of intervention that would be required for containment to occur. And ultimately, we used that model to project what the future of that epidemic will look like," he said.
"That's a realistic possibility but not a foregone conclusion. What's needed is to maintain the current level of vigilance and keep pressing forward as hard as we can," he added.
So, they studied two scenarios - best and worst. For the worst case scenario where there would be no increase in hospital beds and capacities, the average projection was 130,000 Ebola cases. Meanwhile, for the best case scenario, once there is an increase in the bed capacity of hospitals, the projection will only be 50,000 cases.
Aside from that, the model utilized and considered data such as the number of patients hospitalized, cross infection to health care workers, transmission rate from funerals, and efficacy of Ebola control measures. They also used the information from the World Health Organization and Liberia Health Department from July 4 to September 2, 2014.
Based on the latest data, there have been more than 21,000 people who were infected with Ebola and 8,300 of them died mostly from the three worst-stricken countries, Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. In Liberia alone, about 3,500 people have died from the outbreak and it has infected more than 8,200 people.