The Real Health Problem Isn't Ebola, It's No Sick Time for Minimum-Wage Workers

Everyone in Maine is shaking in their boots because Kaci Hickox went on a bike ride. Hickox, a nurse who treated Ebola patients in West Africa, is fighting the state-imposed quarantine in court, saying that it violates her constitutional rights.

The fear is overblown. She is displaying no symptoms (fever, vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding from bodily orifices), and Ebola is not contagious until you are showing symptoms.

So far, no Americans have been infected by Ebola except health care workers who deal directly with Ebola patients. And all the Americans who have caught Ebola have survived (though one doctor is still in the hospital in New York).

This year Ebola has infected 13,000 people in West Africa and 5,000 have died. The death rate appears to be so high in Africa because they don't have the ability to keep sick patients alive long enough for their immune systems to beat the disease on their own. Americans aren't dying of the disease because our hospitals can provide that basic level of care (though the religiously-affiliated hospital in Texas where two nurses were infected was obviously not competent to care for Ebola patients).

Ebola sure does sound scary when you hear the numbers coming out of Africa. But when you look at Ebola in the US, it's much less contagious than many other diseases that infect millions of Americans annually, including flu, pneumonia, measles, mumps, whooping cough, chicken pox, tuberculosis and hepatitis A, B and C.  Hundreds of thousands of Americans die from these diseases every year. Some will leave you physically impaired or sterile even if they don't kill you.

Flu alone kills as many as 50,000 people a year in the United States -- 10 times more than have died of Ebola in the world in the last year. But people go in to work with the flu all the time. Why? Because they don't have a choice: they work in low-wage jobs without any benefits -- in particular, sick leave. If they don't work, they don't get paid, and they can't pay the rent or feed their kids.

It's especially bad for people who work in minimum-wage service jobs -- cooks, dish washers, cashiers, waiters, maids, day care attendants, home care attendants -- exactly the people who are most likely to spread disease to the largest number of people.

Hickox isn't demanding to go to a U2 concert or a rave. She just doesn't want to be imprisoned when she is displaying zero symptoms. If she should be locked up for a month on the off chance that she has Ebola, then why shouldn't every American be forced to into quarantine when they (or their children) actually have diseases like flu, chicken pox, mumps and measles, which are much more infectious than Ebola and can have just as serious consequences?

The real health problem here isn't Ebola: it's the lack of sick days for minimum-wage workers. If you're sick -- with a cold, the flu, or Ebola -- you shouldn't be infecting your customers and coworkers.

Companies don't want to give workers sick time because they're afraid workers will abuse it. But that forces honest workers to stay on the job when they're sick. And the rest of America suffers from unnecessary exposure to contagious diseases: millions of decent folks get sick for fear that a few jerks will game the system.

The medical workers who go to Africa to help stem the tide of Ebola are heroes. They shouldn't be treated like pariahs, though they should severely restrict their travel and social contacts during the incubation period.

They should also be compensated monetarily for any losses they might suffer during this period of isolation. And everyone in America should have that same right when they're sick with any contagious disease.

That would make all of us healthier and happier.