Friday, October 03, 2014

Ebola: Just One Short Of A Major Fail

     Not the disease so much as the hype and hysteria; we have already got:
     1. Guy with ebola
     2. Who decided not to seek treatment (until it looked like he was gonna die)
     3. And who lives with family in a smallish apartment
     4. In a major U. S. city.

     You know what this needs to be complete?  For him to be a Muslim.    Applied paranoia (as opposed to the merely keyboard variety) in three...two...one....

11 comments:

Joe in PNG said...

And, in local TV news stations across America, there was much rejoicing. Film at 11.

Douglas2 said...

I thought that he had sought treatment earlier, and the ER give him antibiotics and sent him home.

fillyjonk said...

Dallas news outlets are reporting a couple other things:

A. He went to the hospital, told them he had been to Liberia, that information didn't get acted on, he got sent home. He came back when he was much sicker.

B. He allegedly lied to an airport official about having been around people with Ebola. (Alternate story: "he didn't know they had Ebola.")

C. The family is now allegedly under ENFORCED quarantine. If this is true, I wonder if this is the first case of quarantine being imposed since...I don't know, the 1940s?

I don't know. Part of me wants to shrug and go "nbd, it will burn itself out in a few days," but part of me wants to build a fortress out of full bottles of Clorox.

Anonymous said...

I seem to recall that Europeans blamed Jew and Moors for the Black Death back in the day. Maybe I'm not remembering my history accurately...

It will be interesting to see how the .gov - and especially those drooling, panicky fools known as "the Congress" - react to this. Mandatory health checks or quarantines for travelers returning to the US from [insert country / region here]? Oh, I know! A cabinet-level agency to deal with this? Dept of Homeland Health Security? 'cuz, as we ALL know, the solution to ANY problem is more bureaucrats (hired by means of a 2000 page law that nobody bothers to read, of course).

fillyjonk - part of me wants to build a fortress out of full bottles of Clorox.

Right there with you.

I think that a great many epidemics can be stopped or at least mitigated by simple but aggressive hygiene protocols, and bleach is definitely good for that sort of thing. Doesn't help with a zombie outbreak, but not every tool works for every job!

Anonymous said...

Quote:
[C. The family is now allegedly under ENFORCED quarantine. If this is true,...]

True. The people in the infected apartment were "asked" not to leave the apartment. A check on them by local health workers found they had ignored this request, and one of the children had even went back to school (he was sent home immediately).

Dallas then declared a true quarantine and has stationed police outside the apartment to be sure it's enforced.

Hazmat decon team has just arrived on site and are starting to decontaminate the apartment, and have plastic covered one car in the parking lot.

As I live about 20 miles from the apartment, I kinda keep an eye on the local news.

Roberta X said...

Wouldn't be surprised if a few more cases show up in this. :(. I have too many friends in that general part of Texas, so my usual suggestion of nuking-from-orbit is out of the question.

Windy Wilson said...

I've been thinking less in terms of Outbreak! and more in terms of Puppetmasters without the parasite slugs, so the nuke 'em from orbit comment resonates in a sort of melancholic way.

fillyjonk said...

I fear the problem is we are going to see more intrusive stuff (like, I don't know, temperature checks of kids as they go into schools) BECAUSE the few individuals who might be infected don't seem to think that the request that they avoid contact with the rest of the public applies to them.

Stay home when you're contagious, folks. This also applies to less deadly diseases like the flu or Norovirus....

Ken said...

"Hazmat decon team has just arrived on site and are starting to decontaminate the apartment, and have plastic covered one car in the parking lot."

That was after the two souls in no PPE whatsoever pressure-washed (looks like, anyway) the sidewalk in the presence of another woman, their own bottle o'Sprite, and who/whatever else happened to have the bad luck to be in the vicinity. Every picture tells a story, but rarely the whole story, so maybe it wasn't as bad as it looked.

DOuglas2 said...

The CDC asked them not to leave the apartment, so they asked "what about food?". Their CDC contact said, OK well go to the store then, but leave the kids at home" They asked "what about the contaminated bedding" and the CDC guy said "don't know, I'll call you back" but then didn't.
It seems to me that with the intervention of church-groups and foreign press these poor people are finally getting humane treatment. It is not at all clear from the timelines of when he travelled and when his relatives back home were diagnosed that Patient 0 was aware of his exposure before travel -- all of the talk of facing charges in both Liberia and Dallas seems to me to be officials trying to deflect attention from their own incompetence by blaming the victim.

rickn8or said...

Then there's THIS idiot.

Not. Helping.