Ebola
October 4, 2014
JAMES N. writes:
There is so much to say about this impending catastrophe that it would take a book to say it.
One little point: The epidemic curve is nearly vertical. That is, more cases this week than last; many more next week than this week. Therefore, with a 21-day incubation period, many, many more West Africans are infected and not yet symptomatic than are sick. These are the people who are trying to get out.
Stopping those near death from boarding an aircraft is sensible, but for every one of them, there will be 100 or more who arrive in the U.S. perfectly well, but destined to become infectious while here. Our current policy is absolutely, totally insane, and every time I think it through, my view of it becomes worse.
I believe that one hospital can, with perfect execution, safely care for one patient with Ebola. But the idea that this idealized scenario is scalable to hundreds of hospitals and hundreds of cases is absurd. Any normal country, with the facts available in early August 2014, would have banned arrivals from Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Any normal international organization would have closed the airports in Conakry, Monrovia, and Freetown to non-military traffic weeks ago.
What they are doing in this situation is, literally, incomprehensible.
— Comments —
George Weinbaum writes:
Shortly after 9/11, I thought the jihadis should infect themselves with smallpox, which has a 10-14 day incubation period, then fly to the U.S., wander the malls and infect tens of thousands. Look at what we have now! We let Obama have the military waste $1.4 million a piece on Tomahawks destroying who knows what in Iraq while we let people come here from Liberia.
Somewhere a jihadi is smiling. Imagine: combining jihad with cries of racism to facilitate biological warfare against the Great Satan. Brilliant!
