With much of the GigaScience team spanning the Hong Kong-Shenzhen border and now confined to remote working, the current 2019-novel coronavirus outbreak has been particularly disruptive and close to home.

Following from his guest blog in October on “Approaches and resources to slow the spread of infection”, Michael Dean from the Center of Cancer Research at the NIH uses his data oriented approach to give an update of where the Ebola epidemic is. While there may be less media coverage (apart from in the UK), this doesn’t relate to the situation on the ground.

**The Ebola pandemic presents one of the most terrifying world health crises in modern times, with devastating consequences in Western Africa [as this goes to press there are now over 10,000 infections and almost 5,000 deaths]. There is a vast amount of data on this crisis available in rapidly published articles and on the internet (check out PLOS Currents: Outbreaks in particular), including past and current numbers of infected;