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Ebola Does Not Require an "Ebola Czar," Nor Calling Up the National Guard
Lasrick writes: David Ropeik explores risk-perception psychology and Ebola in the U.S. "[O]fficials are up against the inherently emotional and instinctive nature of risk-perception psychology. Pioneering research on this subject by Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff, and others, vast research on human cognition by Daniel Kahneman and colleagues, and research on the brain's fear response by neuroscientists Joseph LeDoux, Elizabeth Phelps, and others, all make abundantly clear that the perception of risk is not simply a matter of the facts, but more a matter of how those facts feel. ... People worry more about risks that are new and unfamiliar. People worry more about risks that cause greater pain and suffering. People worry more about threats against which we feel powerless, like a disease for which there is no vaccine and which has a high fatality rate if you get it. And people worry more about threats the more available they are to their consciousness—that is, the more aware people are of them."
Look, every idiot out there wants to see a "response". Take anyone below the 90th percentile a they won't have the intellectual ability to process any probability less than 1 in 4. It's like the entire airline screening process - people feel safer if they see someone doing something. In reality it does little or no good, but until you figure out how to instantly make people smarter and less gullible you will get irrational panic and calls to "do something."
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Fear is relatively easy to manage if you actually have, you know, the peoples' trust. Imagine that. Why, if the public was actually used to the government telling the truth (including telling them when something was actually potentially detrimental to national security, rather than using that as an excuse to obscure _everything_) I'll bet you could just be honest with them and people would be rather rational about the whole thing. Lie through your teeth and then blame it on your predecessors or people you have appointed and you get the current situation.
Then again, who among us today has any experience in an environment where people were actually being honest, even a majority of the time, and especially in any governmental context? The closest you'd get to that today would be certain military units and small teams at companies.
It would go a long way if the US refused direct commercial flights to and from the countries with outbreaks, and refused entry to anyone that has been in one of those countries in the past 3 weeks. The exception would be for US citizens and they should go through quarantine.
We assumed we could easily handle Ebola if it came our way, because we are the most powerful and richest country on Earth. What we should have done is asked, "What are our weaknesses? Where is our medical system likely to fail?" Unfortunately we tend to suck at this kind of introspection. If we had asked, the most glaring weakness in our system, "Not everybody has medical coverage", might have been considered. Then when a sick black man recently arrived from West Africa came to the hospital without medical insurance we might have thought "EBOLA" and treated him right away, instead of thinking "poor Nigger, not gonna pay his bills" and sent him home with some Tylenol.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
The problem is the CDC plan didn't work and the CDC and the hospital completely broke proper isolation procedures.
You never give the care takers permission to leave the town until after they have been isolated long enough to be clean. Let alone when one of them ask for permission to fly when she has a slight fever you say no.
I always figured the CDC could handle a major outbreak. now I don't think they could.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
It should be said that most of the mistakes here were by the hospital in Texas, not the CDC. If the CDC had descended on the hospital like a ton of bricks and the first inkling of Ebola they might have prevented most of that from happening then people would be complaining about Federal overreach. Instead they're complaining they didn't do enough. Regardless of what it does there's a certain sector of the American public that will always find a way to fault the government.
This explains why people freak out about civilian gun ownership but are perfectly fine driving to and from work every day, despite the fact that they are far more likely to die in an automobile accident than from a gun discharge (even in areas where civilian gun ownership is very high).
I wish they'd focus more on things like MRSA and KPC which kills far more people in this country and are far more deadly. These diseases are easily spread and there is no cure for them. While not trying to diminish the cause to fight Ebola, frankly there are a lot of things far deadlier in this country that people should be worried about.
The cases in Texas I think can be squarely blamed on incompetence from the Dallas hospital.
In the case of KPC, Congress has basically put their head in the sand and handtied the CDC and FDA from effectively studying and fighting it, thanks to the livestock lobbies Frontline has a good episode on this. It doesn't help that congress has cut the budget of the CDC significantly over the last decade and played politics to make it difficult to study and fight the causes.
As it is, the CDC had to cut back on their research on Ebola due to the budget cuts and the delays in the worldwide community for fighting and funding the fighting of Ebola aren't helping matters either. If the Dallas hospital wasn't so incompetent, there's a good chance Thomas might have survived and nobody else would have become infected.
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It should be said that most of the mistakes here were by the hospital in Texas, not the CDC.
That's just endless buck-passing. The reality is that the kind of fuck ups that could happen, did happen, like a storyline from some cheap zombie/biothriller novel.
The CDC protocols were flawed and the CDC wasn't there to advise and observe and if they did they screwed that up. Worse, I think the CDC invited complacency with its don't-panic focus. The whole mess in Texas might have been avoided if they had taken a slightly more danger-focused mindset,
Quite simple, what happens reflects the nature of a privatised for profit system. They do lip service to government regulations but if it is more profitable to ignore the rules then the cost of the penalties, regardless of the outcome, then private for profit entities will ignore the rules. When it comes to high risk medical services putting it in the hands of private for profit capitalists based upon the reality of the last century of private for profit entities, is just plain nuts, especially where those private for profit entities would actually generate more profits by failure than by success ie the spread of an infectious disease for them to treat.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Rhinovirus is actually "airborne", in that a pathologically significant amount of virus can in fact exist in aerosolized droplets, unlike ebola, which is almost 10x larger, on average, and much worse at replicating.
Nigeria overall has less resources than US, sure, but compare the what they actually did and the resources they actually _used_.
First, in Nigeria patient zero hit a good observant doctor with a clue, and instead of being sent home with antibiotics, was kept in hospital and restrained to prevent him leaving - all (I believe) before any official quarantine order or similar. The doctor that did that paid with her life. That action probably prevented an epidemic across Lagos, nothing to do with amount of resources and everything to do with one doctor being on the ball and prepared to fight the system to do the right thing.
The official response included tracing close to 1000 primary and secondary contacts, 18,500 personal visits and 100s in isolation / quarantine. They had emergency presidential decrees, overriding the rights people would normally have (probably a lot less than in the US to start with) and extensive use of law enforcement agencies. Widespread advertising campaigns, banning shaking hands, kissing etc., Changing holy communion practices in churches. Closure of _all_ schools.
The US doesn't appear to have done anything like that, despite its greater resources. Maybe Nigeria over-reacted, maybe US under-reacted and got lucky.