I smell a (plague) rat

Something about what just happened this past weekend reminds me of the strong armed railroading the blogosphere experienced during the 2008 primary season.  Clearly, we have learned nothing.

I listened to hours of Johns Hopkins ebola forum videos, read what I could, and tried to sift the “freaking out” crap from real science and came to the conclusion that if it’s important to stop ebola from reaching Kinchasa, it’s just as important to stop it from taking off in NY/NJ for the very same reasons.  And what did we just see?  We saw a nurse who should have been responsible and mature lose her head like a two year having a tantrum because Chris Christie hadn’t given her four star accommodations while his health department figured out what to do with her.

Hey, I don’t like the asshole governor either but this ridiculous overreaction from Hickox isn’t doing anyone any good.  She should still be isolated for 21 days, just like everyone else who has been around infectious ebola patients.

And what’s with this sudden aversion to quarantine?  How does ebola differ from any other disease for which we have no cure?  It doesn’t.  But for some reason, just because we’re living in the 21st century we’re going to turn our backs on the past?  It can’t happen to us?

Whatever happened to “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”?  A quarantine or enforced isolation is worth a whole lot of panic prevention.

In any case, the political machinations that went on last weekend over tantrum throwing nurse has been only partially successful.  Governor Christie looks like a bully until you point out that he has the ultimate authority to enforce a quarantine in his state, not the CDC. It’s not like he is actively defying the CDC’s orders.  He’s looking at the most densely packed state in the union and calculating how to contain a hypothetical outbreak in a place where every municipality is its own fiefdom.

I have overheard others say that if Kaci Hickox didn’t like the way she has been treated in NJ, maybe she would prefer a holding pen at an airport in West Africa.  Oh yeah, no joke.  That’s what the average Joe thinks, as outrageous as that might seem. They’re much more inclined to impose a travel ban now.  She didn’t do her cause any good whatsoever because the first thing these people are thinking is that she can’t be trusted to stay in isolation voluntarily and despite her do-gooder status, she should know in advance what she’s getting into.

So, congratulations whoever you are who cooked up this whole scheme to introduce politics into what should have been alert vigilance.  I suspect that you are the same people who gave us Obama, judging by the manipulations of group dynamics I have seen employed.

I am not a panicker but the s%^( you people have pulled in the last couple of days has me very afraid of what might happen if we do get a genuine outbreak.  You people can not be trusted to save anything but your own skins.

One other note: Some ebola victims never develop a fever.  Most do but there have been instances where a fever is absent, according to Michael Osterholm at the Johns Hopkins Ebola Forum.