This is a dreadful article, even if it is an interesting topic.<p><i>Their forecasts, and those of many other modelers, vastly overpredicted the actual toll of the disease.</i><p>No they didn't.<p>That prediction was in the absence of interventions.<p>They modeled the impact of various interventions and found a best would produce around ~10,000 infections[1] in Liberia in November 2014. In reality there were around 6500, so I'd say that was a pretty accurate prediction.<p>[1] guessing from a graph: <a href="http://currents.plos.org/outbreaks/files/2014/09/LiberiaCombinedTrajectory.png" rel="nofollow">http://currents.plos.org/outbreaks/files/2014/09/LiberiaComb...</a>. Complete paper: <a href="http://currents.plos.org/outbreaks/article/obk-14-0043-modeling-the-impact-of-interventions-on-an-epidemic-of-ebola-in-sierra-leone-and-liberia/" rel="nofollow">http://currents.plos.org/outbreaks/article/obk-14-0043-model...</a>