Current estimates from the World Bank is a cost of 31.6 Billion, but this was made at a point when 3500 people had died. With an indefinite horizon, the is no way to put a number on this.
Currently, the financial markets are centering in on West Africa.
The worst pandemic in the past 100 years was the 1918 Influenza outbreak. The number of deaths have been estimated at from 50 to 100 million.
From Wiki:
The 1918 flu pandemic (January 1918 – December 1920) was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic, the first of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus. It infected 500 million people across the world, including remote Pacific islands and the Arctic, and killed 50 to 100 million of them—three to five percent of the world's population—making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history.
As an interesting aside to this, while treatment was less available at that time, neither was the mobility factor near that of today.
The number of state and federal Public Healthcare workers has declined by 19%% since 2008. Some of the worst projections of changes that may be necessary suggest that instead of individual hospitals gearing up to handle large numbers of patients... it could be necessary to establish large central isolation units to effect the economies of scale. Not just money economies, but allowing for concentrated treatment by greater, centralized training.
(Think... that just to change protective clothing takes four people and 20 minutes).
At this point, the understanding of the disease is in the process of change. The 21 day incubation period, and the means of transmission is still not firmly understood. The establishment of "protocols" for dealing with protection is also in the process of revaluation.
And so, while it is comforting to know that the full attention of the medical community will be centered on containment and cure, we aren't there yet.
Easy to blame the press for hyping the concerns, but the memory of 1918 lingers. Maybe in the long run, public awareness will be the best tool for prevention and control.
Between the worries about ISIS, and the spread of Ebola, no small wonder about the uncertainty of investing.
"The world is too much with us..."
