Ebola could be transmitted when you come into contact with body fluids.

By a simple touch, you would be infected. The goal of the virus, like many others was to infect as many as it could and perpetuate.

Just like we saw with other contagious infections, it is after the infection leaves the incubation phase into a full-blown disease that you begin to infect others.

For one of the strains of Ebola, up to 90 of those who got the disease died. Blood will at some point be coming out of almost every orifice.

Ebola was a bully and once you had it, it is as though a death sentence. Those who had the disease had fever at the onset.

It is for this that we decided to use fever to do the first screening before testing others for the virus. This was effective in controlling the transmission, especially at ports and eventually ending ebola.

Although someone in incubation for Ebola could skip the airport it essentially made you so sick that you could not be mobile and so this made it easy for contact tracing and reduced the number of folks who could infect others.

Now, the current coronavirus uses another means, it airborne and can be spread through nose, eyes, and mouth once touched.

This makes it easy to spread also. Again coronavirus overcame another challenge of Ebola. Corona kills between 2-4 of those who get sick.

This makes humans complacent and not see the real threat until it is out of hand, allowing the virus to thrive. It ensures that 89 out of 100 people who get the infection actually develop mild to no symptoms.

Now here is the catch, you need healthy people or at least people with the capacity to go about their day, as usual, to spread the virus for you. This is the one innovation that helped coronavirus.

Over time, 2-4 mortality will increase and the numbers will go very high as we see in Italy and Spain. This is one of the main reasons that the rate-limiting factor for stopping the coronavirus is the human component.

Humans are able to adapt to break transmission without the use of drugs or vaccines. The goal of coronavirus is to infect people and do damage but allow you to go out there to do more damage so that it can get the numbers.

As we inch closer to a million infected people within 3-4 months since the outbreak, we will likely surpass some 20 million should things remain the way it was when the virus first came out. This virus takes its time.

This is something it learnt from HIV.

HIV allows infected people to walk around and share the virus. It buys them time before it knocks them out. So AIDS creeped upon us without our knowledge. The advantage coronavirus had over HIV is that there are more handshakes than there are when it comes to sex.

When the coronavirus outbreak started, we tried to use temperature to screen just like we did Ebola. The effectiveness was significantly less than Ebola and almost useless given the scale of the situation for a number of reasons.

They had to include an algorithm to screen those coming from epicentres. Some of those people were not showing symptoms or showing mild symptoms or controlled fever. A larger proportion of people infected with coronavirus would beat the screening more than those infected with Ebola.

Currently, Ghana is using the mandatory precautionary quarantine to curl the numbers and transmission of the disease which has proven to be effective in picking up more than 70 people.

You can imagine the numbers they would have infected and by now those they infected would have infected others and we would have had a situation on our hands

This is how the current coronavirus causing the outbreak used innovation, temperance and patience to take more control more than Ebola did.