- Four family members that Thomas Eric Duncan lived with for several days have finished their quarantine Ebola-free.
- No one who flew on the plane with Duncan was infected.
- So far, all the Americans who have contracted Ebola have either pulled through completely, or are still alive and in stable condition. With proper and prompt care, it looks like your chance of survival is much better than it is in Africa, where the death rate is forbidding.
- The lab supervisor on the cruise ship who handled Duncan's Ebola samples tested negative.
- WHO declared Nigeria to be Ebola-free.
The people who are really in danger of Ebola infection are health care workers who must be in close contact with their patients, and people who handle the dead. The reason Ebola spread so quickly in Africa in the first place was the foolish practice of mourners kissing and touching dead bodies, instead of isolating and cremating them immediately.
Long-held religious traditions and beliefs are responsible for so much death, and not just in Africa...
The domestic mess started when a privately-run religious hospital screwed the pooch and failed to diagnose Thomas Duncan. This wasn't a government screw-up.
Where the CDC did screw up was in trusting that this Presbyterian Hospital in Texas was competent to do the job. The hospital clearly did not have the equipment or the training to handle an Ebola patient. It should have said so up front, instead of making its staff cobble together protective gear from layers of rubber gloves and masks.
How clueless Presbyterian was should have been obvious after hey sent Duncan home after failing to add 1 + 1 (guy from Liberia who carried a woman who died of Ebola + fever) and not getting 2 (Ebola).
Anyone who has watched television coverage of the Ebola outbreak in Africa knows that health care workers should be wearing full Hazmat suits and be sprayed down with formaldehyde and blasted with UV after any contact with Ebola patients.Why Presbyterian didn't get this is a total mystery.
The CDC also screwed up by not asking health care workers to quarantine themselves, and giving them the go-ahead to travel on airplanes and cruise ships. They have corrected this oversight, and it looks like no one was infected. So the it seems the CDC was actually correct in their estimation that the potential for infection was quite low. Allowing the nurses to travel was a PR failure, not serious lapse in judgment.
The Ebola panic is not over. But it's clear that if people just exhibit a little common sense and caution it would be as low-key as the CDC has been saying all along. But I guess expecting people to act rationally is too much.
What this episode has made abundantly clear is that the general public has no clue what real health risks are. You are far more likely to die of the flu than Ebola. Yet millions of Americans categorically refuse to get flu shots.
Children are far more likely to die of whooping cough or measles than Ebola, yet their parents insist that immunizations will give their kids autism.
The right wants to restrict the freedom to travel to Africa. Yet you are far more likely to die of a self-inflicted gun-shot wound or shot by your irate husband than die of Ebola, because of the insistence of the gun lobby that people be able to buy any kind of deadly firearm on demand.
Millions of people die of heart disease, stroke, and obesity- and diabetes-related diseases every year, yet every time someone in government encourages people to exercise more, discourages alcohol use or proposes taxes on sugary drinks, the right screams "Nanny state!"
Tens of thousands of Americans die every year in car accidents because they can't be bothered to wear seat belts.
Get a grip, people.
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