.
Yeah, I’m moderately obsessed, because Perfect Storm of Stupid. There are so many useful things we could and should be doing, and yet… from the Paper of Record:
President Obama raised the possibility on Thursday that he might appoint an “Ebola czar” to manage the government’s response to the deadly virus as anxiety grew over the air travel of an infected nurse.
Schools closed in two states, hospitals and airlines kept employees home from work, and Americans debated how much they should worry about a disease that has captured national attention but has so far infected only three people here…
Earlier in the day, lawmakers on Capitol Hill pummeled federal health officials for their response to the public-health emergency that erupted after a Liberian man, Thomas Eric Duncan, tested positive for Ebola last month…
Also in the NYTimes:
Adding a new and troubling dimension to the search for Americans possibly exposed to the Ebola virus, the State Department said Friday that an employee of Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital who may have had contact with specimens of the disease had left the United States aboard a cruise ship.
The employee and a traveling partner, who were not identified by name, had agreed to remain isolated in a cabin aboard the vessel, the State Department said, and “out of an abundance of caution” efforts were underway to repatriate them. A physician aboard the cruise ship had said the employee was in good health…
“The employee did not have direct contact” with Mr. Duncan, the statement said, “but may have had contact with clinical specimens collected from him.”…
Meanwhile, on the “might actually be of some use” front, per Slate:
Now that we’re all agreed that Ebola is everyone’s problem, we’re all totally going to do better fighting it, right? Right. Beyond simply getting hysterical about the widening web of cases in the U.S. and elsewhere, fighting the virus at its source would also seem like a good idea—for everyone. Exactly one month ago—on Sept. 16—the United Nations set up an Ebola Trust Fund seeking $1 billion to do just that. On Thursday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon offered a status report on which countries are ponying up cash and how much they gave.
It presumably didn’t take the U.N. too long to crunch the numbers on contributions. Of the $1 billion needed, only one contribution has been made, of $100,000—by Colombia. That means the U.N. is still, approximately, $9,999,900,000 short of what it thinks it will take to combat Ebola. As a barometer of global commitment, the U.N. trust fund isn’t all that encouraging…
Amy Davidson, in the New Yorker:
… “We know how to stop this,” Sylvia Burwell, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, said in a conference call with reporters. That is all well and good, but the C.D.C. and other health authorities, at every level, can’t just “know”; they also have to act. They can’t just keep repeating that simple competence, prudence, and sympathetic good sense are the answers, while exhibiting none of those traits. Those are the answers: but we have to live them.
The doctors and health workers of Médecins sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, have done so, in heroic, lonesome fashion. The group has been fighting Ebola in the villages of West Africa, where the entire social structure has broken down, since well before the West cared, and with desperately few resources. Pierre Trbovic, an M.S.F. volunteer from Belgium, wrote a few weeks ago about taking on what was regarded as the most awful job at an Ebola center in Liberia: telling people that there were no more beds. “The first person I had to turn away was a father who had brought his sick daughter in the trunk of his car. He was an educated man, and he pleaded with me to take his teenage daughter, saying that while he knew we couldn’t save her life, at least we could save the rest of his family from her. At that point I had to go behind one of the tents to cry,” he said. The center couldn’t admit more without putting all the patients at risk; there was a constant struggle “to keep the tents clean of human excrement, blood, and vomit, and to remove the dead bodies.”
In August, M.S.F. had six hundred and fifty people in the field; now, it has three thousand, in six locations in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. “Now we have reached our ceiling,” Brice de le Vingne, the director of operations, said on Tuesday, according to Reuters. The same day, the group noted that sixteen of its workers had tested positive for the Ebola virus, and nine had died. That here, with our bright hospitals, we would allow the disease to spread through simple carelessness feels like a betrayal.
***********
Apart from despairing that there’s no cure for stupid and it has an unfortunately high R0-value, what’s on the agenda as we wrap up the week?
BlueDWarrior
Sometimes I think the deluge of bad news and fearmongering is intentional on the part of the big media houses to induce crippling fear, paranoia, and nihilism in the public so that they don’t bother to organize to disrupt the system.
Just think of so many people who have lost faith in every public institution, and also feel that there is nothing to be done except wait for the celestial trumpets to sound.
Maybe that’s why there are so many Apocalypse seekers in America…
Botsplainer
Bad editing on the Slate piece on the number snark. It was great, but got completely gutted by the error.
Mustang Bobby
Oh, sweet Jesus in a birchbark canoe, Joe is saying now is the time for panic over Ebola. He and Chris Matthews should get together and jump off a bridge.
raven
Funniest thing have heard in a long time. Joe just called himself a journalist.
bemused
@raven:
Heh.
Amir Khalid
@Botsplainer:
This is how many tears they won’t be shedding over it.
Mustang Bobby
@raven: I switched over to the Weather Channel. Now that’s news I can use.
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: He’s just asking questions.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Mustang Bobby: That solution doesn’t work here in LALAland. We don’t have weather.
NotMax
@raven
Not no way, not no how.
/Bert Lahr as The Lion.
Biggie storm (Ana, currently a Category 1 hurricane – satellite loop) on the way here, but much too early to tell if we’ll get the brunt or just the fringes.
Botsplainer
John Calipari is on my morning TV ahead of Big Blue Madness iterating strongly that certain team cooperative actions “aren’t communism” and a necessary component of his coaching strategy. Twice he says it in the clip I saw.
I’m conflicted. One one hand, I want to applaud the pushback on some criticism he obviously heard (but can’t, because I despise UK with the fiery white heat of 10,000 suns). On the other hand I want to sob over that kind of criticism of team sport actions for a regrettably successful team.
Mustang Bobby
@BillinGlendaleCA: It’s our first weekend of the dry season in South Florida. Clear skies and lower humidity settling in. Good timing; I’m heading up to Lakeland for a huge car show around Lake Mirror. Supposed to be clear and warm all weekend.
Saw a great pic the other day somewhere on the blogosphere: “More people in America have been dumped by Taylor Swift than have died from Ebola.”
raven
@NotMax: some noive
MattF
…and, btw, how many people are going to die from the flu this year? Any guesses?
bemused
@Mustang Bobby:
At least once a week my spouse walks by the tv while someone is freaking out about something and mutters various versions of they are shitting their pants again.
raven
@MattF: Yea but when you have an airborne virus like ebola you have to try to scare the shit out of dumbass people as quickly as possible.
Botsplainer
Oh, that’s a relief. I misunderstood him, which I figured out when I looked up his quotes.
http://www.si.com/extra-mustard/2014/10/16/john-calipari-communist-rant
It was about giving more minutes to solid performers because basketball “isn’t communism”. I can go back to solidly hating on Cash Calipari and the UK Wildcats with a clear conscience.
All is back to right in my world.
Anne Laurie
@MattF: In my first draft, I wondered if public health grad students were monitoring whether the uptick in hand-washing and sanitizers will decrease the number of flu cases this winter!
OzarkHillbilly
Just shoot me. Please.
Phylllis
Our County Emergency Preparedness Director called the other day to alert us to a meeting she’s having next week to develop an ‘Ebola Response Plan’. I had to bite my tongue to keep from telling her to ‘pull up that bird flu plan we never used when that was the freakout du jour and do a find and replace to insert Ebola’. Or maybe freakout du jour.
John S.
Anyone see this gem from Chuck Toddler?
Ebola Is a Midterm Issue, and It’s Not Helping Democrats
And where is the proof for this sensational claim? Why, there is none of course!
I think I can safely say that Chuck Toddler is like Ebola to the body of journalism.
mai naem
Bird flu is from Hong Kong. We need to stop taking flights from Hong Kong and China. Now.
OzarkHillbilly
@John S.: I guess we can safely replace every mention of Dems with Republicans and it will still be true.
Mustang Bobby
Okay, I’m heading out to get the air in the tires topped off. Would someone please text me if the world comes to an end in the next half hour?
Steve
I’m not a scientist but,
I recommend that Republicans that are concerned that the President is not doing enough to atop ebola stay home on election day to stop the spread of stupid.
Professor
Has anybody made a comparison between the broadcast and the dissemination of reporting of Ebola and the Avian Flu viruses? Btw, how many Americans have been killed by gun violence(in the USA) during the same period as the advent of the Ebola scare? Are we all going to die? Is this greatest threat to the Homeland of the USA since the invention of death? We should be told.
FlipYrWhig
@Mustang Bobby: I happened to catch the end of Hardball last night, and I take it that was one of his saner recent performances. First he and his stupid guests talked about whether Obama’s statement was a good one, and then why he made it, and then whether it was effective in terms of suggesting being compassionate and in control rather than “aloof.” Who the fuck cares? Then he blathered on about how the surprises keep coming by the day. Two people are sick and one has died. That ain’t that many surprises. My wife said that coworkers were getting worried because someone in their division had been to Africa recently. They didn’t know which part of Africa. I told her to ask them if they knew if he had been carrying a bucket of diarrhea when he was there.
This may be the stupidest coverage of a story I have ever seen, and I’m 42 years old and have watched the news since Watergate.
chopper
JPL
The Gran Fondo Italia bike race is in my town this weekend. I guess it’s not a race but more of a recreation event. One route has the bikers going to the mountains and is 100 miles. The shortest route is 34 miles. All the routes return using a road near my house which means Sunday is a day to rake and watch games on TV.
Steve: That’s the best idea, I have heard to stop the madness.
debbie
It didn’t take long for EBOLA! to come to central Ohio:
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2014/10/16/Columbus-woman-complains-of-Ebola-symptoms.html
The Fox station was freaking out about this last night, while the NBC affiliate failed to mention this story.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
We could also replace Chuck Todd with a poo-flinging chimp and the quality of the journalism would the the same.
JPL
The children who came in contact with Duncan hopefully stay healthy. If so, they should be able to return to school next week. Any bets on whether or not the parents of other students will freak out when they do.
BillinGlendaleCA
@FlipYrWhig: OMG, I should really panic. My neighbors just returned from Africa AND the kid works in a hospital.
ETA: The neighbors went to Madagascar and the kid works in a hospital in CA one day a week doing her clinical for her nursing degree. But Joe says I should be worried, should I? He seems to be very worried.
Kay
I may be alone in this, but are people really amazed when people screw up at work? Has it been your experience as an adult that everything runs like a well-oiled machine, everywhere, all the time?
It hasn’t been mine. I am also not perfect at work. I make mistakes at work.
I’m not that shocked that they screwed up with the first round of patients, and I would bet that if there are more patients someone somewhere will make additional mistakes. People should be competent at work, that is absolutely true, but I’ve never believed that everyone is, all the time and without exception. I haven’t even spent that much time in hospitals and I’ve witnessed mistakes. Knowing that didn’t shatter my faith in anything, because I never thought they were 100% perfect to begin with, which would make them exactly the same as every other large or complex endeavor or organization or group of employees.
debbie
And Louie Gohmert labels the poor training for nurses as Democrats’ War on Women:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/gohmert-cdc-war-on-women-nurses
I don’t know if it can get stupider than this.
Baud
@Kay:
Agree 100%.
Baud
@Kay:
Can you imagine if the military were held to the same standard?
BillinGlendaleCA
@Kay: Agreed, the only problem is when you don’t learn from your mistakes.
debbie
@Kay:
Expecting things to go smoothly is something that could legitimately be blamed on Hollywood.
Baud
I just hope Spanish flu doesn’t get jealous of all this ebola hysteria.
Kay
@Baud:
It’s a really profound act to limit someone’s movement and ability to go where they want. It’s huge in US law. I would think it would take at least a week to figure out who they can put on what is essentially voluntary house arrest and be clear on why they’re doing that. I get that it’s consensual (so far!) but it’s still a big step in this country. I know there’s risk but this is a balancing act, risk/level of restraint or response, and it’s one we always grapple with. It’s difficult to draw the line.
Chris
@BlueDWarrior:
I feel like the biggest success of movement conservatism since Nixon/Reagan wasn’t the rise of the right, it was killing the left. Nowadays, even among people who are furious at Wall Street, Republicans and the rest of the system, there are plenty who are equally disillusioned with or suspicious of the federal government, organized labor, et al – people who don’t buy the idea of “trickle down” or “conservatism will make us all rich,” but also don’t think there’s much the government or unions can do about it, and they’ll probably just make it worse if they try.
There’s Movement Conservatism By True Faith, and then there’s Movement Conservatism By Resignation.
Baud
@Kay:
Yeah, this is a country where a substantial portion of the public would have a fit at the idea of mandatory vaccination for children.
Baud
@Chris:
I agree.
Kay
@debbie:
They do this all the time in media. It drives me crazy. I don’t think adults should allow themselves to indulge in what I consider a fantasy that they are “safe”. I want to say “you’re not safe. You were never safe. Just deal with the uncertainty and risk inherent in this new situation”. I think it’s childish.
Botsplainer
@Kay:
One of the things I like about this administration is its willingness to acknowledge fuckups and to adjust strategies as fluid situations change.
That was the biggest problem of the Bush Administration – the tendency to make a decision to either act or not act, and to relentlessly justify and demand appreciation, thanks and kudos for the decision made regardless of whether it was working as designed. You cad to call it successful even when it wasn’t.
I tend to see that as Confederate thinking, that every act by white guys must be praised to the heavens, regardless of how cruel or disastrous the results.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Mustang Bobby: I’m on it. Nope, hasn’t ended yet.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: That’s absolutely true; we shouldn’t expect perfection. But it is alarming when people who are in charge of the institutions that are supposed to handle this shit just flat out lie to us or are revealed as clueless about their organizations’ state of preparedness.
I was talking to some family members last night, one of whom is a nurse and the other an ER doctor. Both are smart, committed people, and neither is typically a hysteric, and they’re worried.
They think we could end up with thousands of Ebola cases in the US and widespread panic, not because we don’t know how to stamp it out but because, so far, our healthcare system isn’t doing the right things, isn’t ready, and the world isn’t doing enough to address the outbreak at its source.
Kay
@Baud:
Exactly! We can’t even agree on whether health care workers should be mandated to get flu shots- I think they should have to. Now we’re ready to go right to house arrest. I also love how they’re drumming up fear and then eagerly reporting on the rising fear. Once again, they are making “the news”. This cycling they do is exhausting. They’re like addicts. They’re on a wild drunk and by next week they will they will be all bleary-eyed and hungover and lashing out and claiming they never would have gone so crazy if they had just seen some leadership and there had been a plan.
Mustang Bobby
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): Good. Just got back and the sun is coming up, the birds are singing, and if you turn off the TV, it’s a beautiful morning in South Florida.
Botsplainer
@Betty Cracker:
Conservatism is all about “close the borders”. I’m not kidding myself; I know where that comes from.
Problem is, the experts are right – it would spread faster and shatter the global economy it the process.
Nigeria would no longer be able to contain it, and SubSaharan Africa would get it bad; all those borders are porous. Given the migration of Indians throughout Africa, it would likely get there, setting off an uncontrollable nightmare, and guaranteeing a global pandemic.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
That’s fair, but I think we have to admit we don’t really have a “health care system”. We have kind of a creaky and underfunded public health apparatus, federal, state, county, but our “health care system” is really a patched together network of private providers. I knew that. I never considered how it might function with something like a national epidemic, it’s a great question and maybe I should have thought about it, but I knew the nature of the thing going in. It’s fragmented. It’s private.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Biggest problem IMHO.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
I can never decide if there’s a failure because the thing was never really tested, systemic failure and our faith was misplaced, or if there’s a failure because of individual screw-ups. If we need a national health care “system” and we push on it and think we have it and it fails, did we ever actually have a good national “system” or did it fail? Did it not fail at all and was instead just the ordinary error rate, and we never pay attention to that because it’s a huge country and health care is fragmented and private?
I get tons of shit for Ohio’s election system, for example, and I’m sure you get jokes about Florida’s, but if you’re in NY or Alabama you don’t know if you have a good election system because it’s never tested. It’s never close.
mai naem
Maybe somebody should ask if he’s paying individually for each of his seven kids and if he’s not why not? Why the hell should I have to subsidize his familty because he’s decided to not abstain from sex and have seven kids. Also too, since he doesn’t like government regulation, would he be for rolling back the regulation involved in having multiple kid families pay the same rate for insurance as families that have one child. Seven kids? Really? In 2014? What a selfish couple. The earth doesn’t have the resources to support 7 child families. And, yeah, I know about the Dumb Duggars.
raven
@Mustang Bobby: And if you have a new hearing aid the birds will scare the crap out of you!
mai naem
I hate to say this but I have to agree with Mika. This admin’s optics are horrible. This has been going on since O-care. I totally don’t get it because they’re so damn good in optics during the campaigns. I also wish that the media was doing more on ebola education instead of ginning up hysteria. I mean provide a real public service like their broadcast licenses expect them to do. It’s truly disgusting.
Snarki, child of Loki
Could it be time for the NRO wankathon-cruise? Oh please oh please oh please oh please…LOKI? YOU LISTENING??1?
FlipYrWhig
@mai naem: Just ignore the whole concept of “optics.” It’s self-referential, for one thing, and for another, it’s a way for the media to report on the media. “Why do we suck? Because the people who could do things we think would make us suck less aren’t doing them properly, so we have no choice. Now let’s talk to a ‘body language expert’ about this.”
Chris
@Botsplainer:
Related: the fact that their foreign policy doctrine is allegedly some version of “don’t do stupid shit.” You know what? I can live with that. It’s a lot better than trying to crank out some one-size-fit-all doctrine for the messy world out there like so many presidents have done.
beltane
@Snarki, child of Loki: Alas, it was one of those Carnival diarrhea-fest cruises.
Brendan in NC
I was listening to the self proclaimed “Colossus of the South”, WBT, here in Charlotte. And all I heard about Ebola was from the Wile E. Coyote’s who don’t trust the government to tell the truth, or the hospitals. I wanted so badly to call in; and advise everyone who’s so deathly afraid they’ll catch Ebola who isn’t a health care professional to do the following:
1. Find the tallest building in their area
2. Climb to the top of it
3. Jump!!!
That would both rid us of these fear spewing folks, and raise the general IQ of the area a couple points.
greennotGreen
@mai naem: Or are the administration’s optics “horrible” because no matter what they do, the Republicans will oppose, and the media, in the interest of “fairness” will present both sides as sane. If the Republican side is patently insane, then the media will misrepresent the administration’s side as similarly nuts.
Somehow, when the Republican Party went off the rails, it took the media with it.
beltane
@Brendan in NC: It would also save lives. These fear-spewing wingnuts, if frightened enough, might very well start attacking hospitals, health care workers, and any random person who fills them with fear.
Betty Cracker
@FlipYrWhig: I wish we had an intelligent, well-informed electorate and could thus safely ignore “optics.” I also wish I had a pet unicorn that pissed bourbon and pooped bacon.
beltane
Louie “the genius” Gohmert claims that Ebola nurses are part of the Democrats’ war on women http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/10/louie-gohmert-nurses-infected-with-ebola-are-part-of-the-democrats-war-on-women/
I’m a lot more afraid of stupid wingnuts with their 13th century outlook on life than I am of Ebola. Stupidity kills and we have an overabundance of stupidity in this country.
Cervantes
@MattF:
Fair question but the situations are not equivalent.
Nor is the question particularly helpful if we care about what’s happening, and what’s about to happen, in West Africa.
Since the Ebola virus was first documented in 1976 near the Ebola River in Congo, 35% of all cases, ever, were documented in September 2014. To reiterate: 65% of all cases developed over 444 months, and the remaining 35% showed up in one month. The CDC estimated two weeks ago that, given the utter lack of what’s needed, more than 1,000,000 new cases will be documented before the end of the year — assuming there’s anyone left able to do the documenting.
As for the utter lack of what’s needed: care and care-givers. As for care: hospital beds and fluid resuscitation for patients; and protective gear for care-givers. In Liberia hospital beds are practically non-existent and there is virtually no protective gear available. As for care-givers: in Cuba there are 6.7 doctors per thousand people; in the US we have roughly 2.4; and Liberians now have fewer than 0.01 — and fewer each day as they are killed by the virus.
Flu is dangerous, too, you’re right, but it’s not even on the same graph as the dynamics of what’s about to happen in West Africa.
Mustang Bobby
@raven: Tippi Hedron on Line 1 for you.
Belafon
@Kay: No, as everyone says, and I agree with, we have a health insurance system, which is as close as we’re going to get to a health care system unless we reach 1918 flu pandemic levels.
Mr Stagger Lee
So the Republicans are happily exploiting this so here is what the Republicans will do to fight the Ebola
A. Repeal Obamacare
B.Tax Cuts for the rich
C. Moar Gunz!
D. Lots of Jesus for faith healing
(for the poor folks of course)
FlipYrWhig
@Betty Cracker: I don’t think anyone makes decisions about who to vote for based on “optics,” though. It’s too meta. Even if they do, IMHO, media coverage of “optics” is insane and circular. I don’t think anyone has ever learned anything from (a) what the media is reporting about (b) how people are reacting to (c) what the media is reporting about (d) the tone and theatrics a politician uses in the course of (e) responding to an event or set a policy. And that chain is like 97% of Chris Matthews’s livelihood, and at least 93% of the White House press corps.
Belafon
@mai naem: The only state with this occurring is in Texas, where I live, and we by God damn it are not going to be an O-care state. Mika can shove her optics line up her ass. If it were an optics problem for Obama, Perry would be on the TV all the time. What’s he doing? Hiding. He doesn’t want to have to answer those questions.
beltane
@Mr Stagger Lee: Everyone can just go to the emergency room when they’re sick! That will do wonders to curb the spread of an epidemic.
Cervantes
@FlipYrWhig:
How do you figure that? If we define “optics” as what people see of politics and politicians, what other basis is there for voters’ decisions?
FlipYrWhig
@Cervantes: That’s not what “optics” is. Not to me. The way the media talks about “optics,” it’s this thing where the politician tries to show a certain mood or personality, and then they analyze whether he or she accomplished that. It’s not what the politician does or says, it’s the pure stagecraft of how that politician made you feel about what he was doing and saying. And even if “optics” is relevant, the media covers meta-optics more so than optics: “did Obama succeed in projecting strength/compassion/thoroughness/openness, etc.?” “What impression do you think he was trying to convey, and why, and did he pull it off, and how will it affect the next election?” It’s all they talk about. It’s all they know how to talk about.
Betty Cracker
@Cervantes:
Christ on a pony, if ever a body of water had a branding problem…
FlipYrWhig
@Cervantes: For instance, after the statement yesterday, Chris Matthews and his panel got all excited about how Obama said that he might be open to having an “Ebola czar,” because that statement was different from other statements, and what did the change in statements mean, and how did it work in terms of creating reassurance, and all that. They didn’t discuss whether it was a good idea. They didn’t even discuss whether he was leaning in favor of doing it or not. Instead they discussed how the statement he made about what he might do was different than earlier statements he had made about what he might do, and what the change in meta-statements must mean at a meta-level. This strikes me as both typical and unbelievably idiotic.
Cervantes
@FlipYrWhig: OK, “meta-optics” is above my pay-grade.
Mr Stagger Lee
@Betty Cracker: Yeah and I wanted to see the Outdoor Channel’s special
“Fishing on the Ebola River with Bill Dance”
Betty Cracker
@FlipYrWhig: We are operating under different definitions of the word “optics” then: To me, it means the way people see things — how they perceive events, policies, leaders, etc. The media help shape those perceptions, and they suck at it. No disagreement there!
Baud
@FlipYrWhig:
Completely anecdotal, but I’ve run into more and more regular Democrats (non-bloggers) who have grown disgusted with the media.
raven
@Mr Stagger Lee: More likely Fishing with John Lurie
John Lurie knows absolutely nothing about fishing, but that doesn’t stop him from undertaking the adventure of a lifetime in Fishing with John. Traveling with his special guests to the most exotic and dangerous places on earth,
Cervantes
@Betty Cracker:
I’m with you — except for the part I emphasized: our media elite do their assigned tasks pretty well.
FlipYrWhig
@Betty Cracker: But then by _covering_ “optics” you end up with even worse coverage of how well optics-management is working. And that’s what I think of as “meta-optics.” “Judging by his statement, the president was trying to look strong. Did he succeed in looking strong to you, Reporter? Do you think The American People will consider him to have succeeded in looking strong? If they don’t consider him to have succeeded in looking strong, what will he have to do to address that?”
Kay
@Belafon:
I don’t know what a good response would look like. I don’t have anything to compare it to. I don’t even know what a good CDC director would look like. Maybe the current one is in the top ten per cent of possible CDC directors, and we should keep him.
I don’t think I’m suited to these sorts of things. I had occasion to look up how many people get fired the other day, I went to the Dept of Labor, they track that, and the rate of involuntary separations (which includes lay-offs) is low. It’s about 5% over a year. Unless I believe the other 95% who don’t get fired are super-duper (I don’t) then we don’t fire a whole lot of people who are below average and that’s our national workforce. They range from “great” to “just above getting fired”.
d58826
@raven: The flu is airborne not Ebola. Ebola is spread by contact with body fluids which is why all of the people on the plane with the American who died in Nigeria and all of the people on the plane with Mr. Duncan are still healthy.
raven
@d58826: No, really? Well why would Nicole Wallace compare this crisis to the film Outbreak???
Betty Cracker
@FlipYrWhig: Well, “meta-optics” — as distinct from “optics” certainly do seem as useless as tits on a boar, apart from their (questionable) ability to sell soap, so I agree with you there.
But the original comment was that the Obama administration is bungling the “optics” that do affect how actual people vote, and I think it’s a fair point. Instead of considering the possibility of whether or not an “Ebola Czar” is necessary, I wish Obama had said it would be nice if the fucking Congress had approved his Surgeon General nominee last year.
PurpleGirl
@raven: I tried formulating a snarky answer to your post, but my snark creativity is lacking compared to yours. Well done, sir.
d58826
Tweety is still pounding the drum that Obama said that Ebola would not come here BUT IT DID. Tweety doesn’t seem to listen to his own newsclips. In the full version Obama said an outbreak was unlikely but we had to be prepared for isolated cases showing up. Any one with the brain of a snail would understand that ‘an outbreak’ is what is happening in West Africa not what has happened in Texas.
raven: Why would she refer to the film Outbreak? She probably gets all her information from Hollywood horror movies.
raven
@d58826: Because she’s a motherfucking idiot?
scav
Another sneaky clue. If the O so the Sky is Falling EbolaEbolaEbola! terrified media faces have the ability to stop on a dime p and pontificate at length about optics rather than actual events and policy-in-action (policy in abstract theory doesn’t count) then they’re not really that actually concerned, it’s just some indulgent cardio-vascular workout with some cardboard Iron John-ish primal scream component.
FlipYrWhig
@Betty Cracker: I just don’t accept that “bungling the optics” means anything or affects anything. There’s doing and there’s talking, and speculating if the talking must have been the wrong kind of talking because of how people must be perceiving the feeling behind that talking, impressionistically… there’s just too many loops, and I doubt it’s worth discussing.
beltane
@scav: These are the same people who breathlessly flapped around for weeks over the fate of a missing plane.
FlipYrWhig
@scav: Total agreement.
FlipYrWhig
@beltane: Maybe Ebola could disappear into a black hole. Have they considered that? #donLemon
Belafon
@Kay: From his wikipedia page, our current CDC director did a really good job when he was in charge of the health system in New York. The thing is, the CDC director is not in charge of the hospitals in this country, so I only see that there is so much that he can do.
d58826
@raven: Also a very plausible explaination :-)
Betty Cracker
@FlipYrWhig: To believe that “optics” — how people perceive leaders and events — don’t matter is to believe that Americans vote based on a no-bullshit analysis of the facts.
Let’s call it “perceptions” rather than “optics” — that works for me as “optics” in the sense we’ve been using it is a PR flak corruption of a perfectly lovely scientific term. But whatever we choose to call it, it damn sure DOES matter if you care about who gets elected.
Belafon
@d58826: If you’re going to refer to a film to which this applies, 28 Weeks Later would be way more appropriate.
PurpleGirl
Everything I know about history I learned from Highlander… or, Everything I know about medical epidemics I learned from Hollywood movies.
FlipYrWhig
@Betty Cracker: I’ll concede that something of the kind matters, but I think the media covers it in godawful, speculative, and entirely circular ways, most of which end up reverse-engineering their own opinions through a process of projecting themselves onto The American People. “If I were a stupid sap, what would I want the president to say? Did he say the right thing to soothe my hypothetical ignorance and insecurity, or at least say it the right way?” Just cut the bullshit already.
the Conster
When was the last time anyone actually learned something useful by watching any broadcast news or talking head panels? I’ve been watching the evening broadcasts carefully, changing between the networks, and I haven’t heard one useful discussion that helps me understand the context of anything. It’s like every night is another pass by the little plastic castle that is called “the news”, which is a thing that exists outside of history, disconnected to everything else, plus car chases, natural disasters and missing white women. It’s amazing really how far and fast broadcast journalism has fallen.
Elizabelle
@BlueDWarrior:
I think that too.
We have got to beat it. I want to see big media and pundits revealed as the talking (to themselves and Republicans) heads that they are.
schrodinger's cat
Have any of the talking heads suggested canceling all flights going out of Texas?
Bobby Thomson
@Cervantes: flu is much much more dangerous to Americans because it is orders of magnitude more contagious. Stop wetting yourself.
jnfr
Just FYI, but the RSS feed is dead. Empty actually. No idea why.
scav
@jnfr: Clearly, Black Hole or, more likely, Ebola has gone Full Digital. Just wait until you see the impact a casual bullshit- and feces-laden tweet will have soon.
Mnemosyne
@Bobby Thomson:
The flu kills about 30,000 people every year in the United States. So far, Ebola has killed one (1) person.
Citizen_X
@Snarki, child of Loki:
Oh Mr. E. A. Poe, wherever you are, how about a rewrite of one of your stories, please? Call it Masque of the Red Derp.
gogol's wife
@Citizen_X:
LOL
Bobby Thomson
@Mnemosyne:
QFT. This super scary thing looks pretty damn containable to me.
And for the love of FSM, Cole, do something about the god damn Verizon autoplay ad! That’s a greater threat to my health than Ebola.
Betty Cracker
@Bobby Thomson: Cervantes can tilt at his own windmills, but in fairness, he was saying Ebola is a genuine crisis in West Africa, not the US. And while it’s fun and justified to mock the media-driven Ebola hysteria in the US, it’s not wise to act as if there’s no danger at all.
I’m not a healthcare worker, so it would be dumb for me to worry about catching Ebola, but it is a serious health crisis right now in Africa that requires the world’s urgent attention. I hope we can all agree on that.
schrodinger's cat
I have a non-Ebola related question. Where can one buy nozzles for piping frosting? Which brick and mortar store?
Belafon
@Betty Cracker: I’m pretty sure we can all agree with that. This is probably the one time we all agree with “Fight it over there so we don’t have to fight it here.” Well, OK, the first time Obama says that suddenly Republicans won’t have anything to do with it, but still.
gene108
@Mnemosyne:
How many people get the flu every year? 1 million, 10 million, 100 million? The deathrate, as a percentage of those with the illness, is lower than Ebola.
3 people contracted Ebola, one is dead. That’s 33.33% kill rate.
If 1/3 of all people getting the flu died, we’d be more panicked about it, but must people have had a flu bug and lived, at some point in their lives, so the panic factor is not there.
Same goes for other “high risk” activities, like driving, where the death rate is greater than airplane crashes, but we worry more about airplanes than the state of roads because we drive regularly and live, whereas people do not fly as often.
Belafon
@gene108:
Hopefully you’re just talking about why people are responding the way they do, and not why we should be freaking out about Ebola.
It’s like the difference between air travel and driving, or heart attacks and cancer. The fear is disproportionate to the reality.
And at a three person sample, i believe that means the actual kill rate is something between 0% and 90%.
beth
@schrodinger’s cat: Craft stores like Michaels or (ugh) Hobby Lobby have them. I’ve seen them at Walmart and Target too. A kitchen store would probably have them also.
japa21
@schrodinger’s cat: Just about any place which sells kitchen accessories. Even Penney’s should have them.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Kay:
That reminds me of my disgust at the over-use of the word “uncertainty” especially in economics reporting over the last 8 years or so. There are no guarantees and no certainty about the future. No, Mr. Master of the Universe, you are not guaranteed a big profit. Quit using that word to give people the heebie jeebies about what’s going on (or not going on). We don’t need to chase an unobtainable “certainty”, we need to collect data, analyze it sensibly, learn from history, and implement sensible policies. Not reward people who expect success to be handed to them by the country, and for the country to be grateful!
The media has played a huge role in making the USA a nation of bed-wetting fraidycats. They spread the toxic memes that enable idiots to successfully run for office and prevent the implementation of sensible policies.
It’s a disgrace.
:-(
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who worries much more about idiot drivers than about Ebola.)
Elie
@BillinGlendaleCA:
This…
That is why I react so strongly to people aggressively “blaming and shaming” — people then just avoid accountability or learning for the future. You have to stay cool as much as possible and help each other. Medical care particularly is complex.. we definitely need to have standards for performance but we have to support each other to achieve them. Human error is a definite given.
japa21
@gene108: If you are talking about people who have contracted Ebola in the US, the actual number is 2 and zero deaths. If you are talking about the number of people who have been treated for Ebola in the US, I think the number is 6, one of which has died.
Yes, Ebola, overall, has a far greater fatality rate than the flu. But the flu is much more easily transmissable and much harder to contain.
Get back to me in a couple weeks and let’s see how many cases there are.
And yes, the key, ultimately, is getting it under control where it started, the 3 countries currently dealing with a high number of cases. It will be hard d/t how bad it has gotten there and should have been focused on much earlier.
schrodinger's cat
@japa21: @beth: Thanks so much!
Elie
@gene108:
wrong denominator. denominator is everyone closely exposed,which when adding all the nurses, etc and his family needs to be about 70 people conservatively. Of the people exposed to him, so far none have died. He was the index case here.
Elie
@Elie:
Wait – Japa is right! scrub my comment.. I am wrong….
Ripley
@schrodinger’s cat: Pretty sure the Crate & Barrel/Ebola Survival Outlet carries them.
Elie
Almost as bad as our “fraydicat” ways is our sense of entitlement to perfection and absolute control…
You know, we needed to have this and even maybe ISIS — threats not easily solved with coercion and power alone. We need to think about power and control very differently — to be more humble and effing Think more… Its scary how unconsciously many people whirl through their lives…. how susceptible that makes them to lame theories and outright lies because they don’t think…
We are a nation of perpetual spoiled children… we need, and the world needs us to grow up
d58826
@japa21: And a bit of additional positive news is that many of those people, including Duncan’s family members. are nearing the 21 day quarantine limit and are still healthy.
Mike E
@schrodinger’s cat: If’n the piping ain’t fancy, you can use a freezer bag and snip the corner for the “nozzle”.
Cervantes
@Betty Cracker:
Illiteracy abounds. Not a surprise.
But thanks for trying to add light where it was apparently dim.
Cervantes
@Bobby Thomson:
@Mnemosyne:
All I can say is: you two deserve each other.
schrodinger's cat
@Mike E: I do want the star tip, I want to make chakli.
Elie
Maybe we also need to develop some scenario examples for the panic stricken on why travel bans don’t work if we don’t get on top of this at the source.
I was thinking that as the disease reels out of control in the three countries, people escape to any number of other countries both adjacent to them or not. Some of those people will be infected, transmit the disease and even if they die, the exposed people with no record of the earlier exposure to someone from the 3 sources, could do the same to another country. There are many people of different nationalities in Africa doing business. For example, many people from India live and work in Africa but have ties to India. Once in India, with little good healthcare infrastructure, the risk of further amplification would increase and the dissemination of disease through people traveling all over would continue. People also forget that “travel” includes travel for commerce — delivering food, equipment, other essentials all over the world. People escaping “under the net” will use that as well and if we shut that down also, not only will economies suffer but people will starve, no treatments and medicines will be available and all kinds of other things.
The absolute answer is to quell the infection at its source. Having the model or example however would hopefully help the scairdy cats understand why. It won’t be just a bunch of obviously blackity black Africans but a complex and diverse group of people of many ethnicities and nationalities who would end up here and everywhere in the world.
Cervantes
@schrodinger’s cat: I imagine Jo-Ann has them.
JR in WV
@MattF:
Flu and pneumonia combined (how they track it) my guess is 55K plus or minus 5k, just in the USA…
JR in WV
@Kay:
I’m imagining the laws about home confinement from when polio was big are still on the books. The health departments have a lot of power in case of a public health emergency.
Since antibiotics and vaccines became common (maybe too common on the antibiotics) we’ve kind of forgotten about quarantine and how useful it is for contagious and serious diseases. But the rules are still there, I’m sure. Just dust the books off, study up for half an hour, you’re good to go on making people not spread the plague.
Ken_L
Having watched from afar the American response first to ISIS, and then to Ebola, I have decided the country is beyond salvage. It’s mass hysteria beyond belief.