PNAS – Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/
(Accessed 7 November 2015)

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Social Sciences – Economic Sciences:
Commentary: Impact of bed capacity on spatiotemporal shifts in Ebola transmission
Jeffrey P. Townsend,
Laura A. Skrip,
and Alison P. Galvani
PNAS 2015 ; published ahead of print October 30, 2015, doi:10.1073/pnas.1518484112
Extract
The unprecedentedly devastating Ebola epidemic in West Africa brought international attention to the challenges faced by resource-constrained nations in curtailing outbreaks. As the epidemic tapers in Sierra Leone and Guinea, the focus of epidemiologists has shifted from emergency response toward retrospection. Lessons learned from this outbreak will be fundamental for establishing preparedness strategies and for averting future epidemics. In a masterful data-driven modeling study in PNAS, Kucharski et al. (1) quantified the extent to which the international effort to provide more treatment beds prevented new infections across the 12 districts of Sierra Leone, as well as the incremental benefit that could have been achieved if the provision had been earlier in the epidemic.