3 Scope of the Outbreak by Country 3 Scope of the Outbreak by Country 3.2 Weekly New Cases By Country

3.1 Weekly Cumulative Cases By Country

The stacked bar chart in Figure 6 describes the history of the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the most effected west African countries. The bars represent cumulative case counts presented at weekly intervals. All confirmed, probable, and suspected cases of EVD are included.

Figure 6: Weekly Cumulative Cases of Ebola by Country

Stacked bar chart depicting country specific cumulative case histories of Ebola virus disease in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea presented at weekly intervals.

The curves in Figure 7 describe the cumulative history of of the current Ebola outbreak in several west Africa countries. The circles represent data points from Table 1. The smooth curves are polynomial trends fitted to the cumulative case data. All confirmed, probable, and suspected cases of EVD are included.

Figure 7: Weekly Cumulative Case Trends by Country

Line graph depicting country specific cumulative case histories of the Ebola outbreak in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea presented at weekly intervals on a common Y axis. Polynomial trend curves are fitted to the data.

Data in this section comprise weekly snapshots from Table 1. Weeks are considered to begin on Monday and end on Sunday, which matches the WHO’s definition of an epidemiological week. Weekly summaries start with the week ending Sunday 3-Aug–14 (epidemiological week 31). The granularity of data available from the World Health Organization precludes the theoretical implementation of this algorithm (i.e. WHO data is not always published on Sundays). Therefore, the algorithm is implemented in practice by displaying the final data released during each epidemiological week. This procedure will skew the linearity of the time axes slightly.