Yes, I read the full report in MMWR and I'm fully aware of the limitations of such extrapolation of current trends into the future.

I wrote a long reponse but decided it's not helpful to most readers to argue the points.

"Deadly" to most people is a subjective term, not a statistical one, and as I said, I think Ebola is perceived as the deadlier disease in the subjective sense. I then mention the CDC report to illustrate the gravity of the current outbreak because the trends indicate that without a robust response, Ebola could become deadly in the statistical sense, too, possibly killing in the neighborhood of the same number of people as malaria without a robust intervention. No prior Ebola outbreak has taken off like this before or infected so many people across such a wide area, so no one has any idea how or when this particular outbreak ends.

I'm not confident that there will be a widespread, sustained response to set up enough ETU's to put a dent in the natural course of the outbreak. Nor am I confident that the underreporting situation will noticeably improve, so in my opinion, corrected (and numerically higher) estimates are the better number to use. These are the two major components of the model that humans can directly influence in the weeks and months ahead. Of course, no one can predict how the virus itself will change over time.

Because I think the human intervention effort will fall short, I'm hoping that the virus makes some unexpected change that causes the outbreak to quickly subside on its own, leaving people wondering where the heck Ebola went. That would be the best case scenario.