Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

White supremacy is terrorism.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

You are here: Home / Healthcare / World's Best Healthcare (If You Can Afford It) / “Just Quarantine Everyone, Mission Accomplished!”

“Just Quarantine Everyone, Mission Accomplished!”

by | 29 Comments

This post is in: , ,

ebola nurses at the pointy end davies

(Matt Davies via GoComics.com)

.
Nothing can be made foolproof, because the fools are so ingenious. From the NYTimes, “Life in Quarantine for Ebola Exposure: 21 Days of Fear and Loathing“:

… As the Ebola scare spreads from Texas to Ohio and beyond, the number of people who have locked themselves away — some under government orders, others voluntarily — has grown well beyond those who lived with and cared for Mr. Duncan before his death on Oct. 8. The discovery last week that two nurses at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital here had caught the virus while treating Mr. Duncan extended concentric circles of fear to new sets of hospital workers and other contacts…

Dr. Howard Markel, who teaches the history of medicine at the University of Michigan, said the quarantines recalled the country’s distant epidemics of cholera, typhus and bubonic plague.

“Ebola is jerking us back to the 19th century,” he said. “It’s terrible. It’s isolating. It’s scary. You’re not connecting with other human beings, and you are fearful of a microbiologic time bomb ticking inside you.”

While a quarantine is designed to protect those on the outside, it also fuels the community’s fear, and sometimes its cruelty.

In Payson, Ariz., paranoia ignited after word spread that a missionary who had traveled to Liberia on a church trip was spending three weeks under a self-imposed quarantine with his wife and four children. The missionary, Allen Mann, strung yellow caution tape and a “No Trespassing” sign around his front door and left a bucket in the yard for neighbors to drop off food and treats for his children.

While most neighbors understood there was scant risk that Mr. Mann, 41, had carried the disease home, rumors nevertheless coursed around town that he had tested positive for Ebola and would soon be medically evacuated. Mr. Mann said an anonymous commentator on a local news website had suggested burning down his house.

“People had this lynch-mob mentality,” he said.

As with other aspects of the Ebola response, the criteria for recommending or requiring quarantine have often seemed ad hoc, random and evolving…

For the record, before I’m accused of wanting to kill innocent people: Quarantine can be a vital tool of public health, and used correctly has saved millions of lives. It’s the “used correctly” that’s an issue. There’s a part of our brains that never evolved beyond a bunch of primates squatting on a patch of brush, bristling in suspicion of the bunch of primates in the patch of brush over there, who are known to be filthy disease-bearing sub-primates with disgusting personal habits just slavering to befoul our precious primate bodily fluids and destroy our primate way of life. And every petty would-be leader knows that screaming imprecations at those primates-who-are-not-us will attract followers…

Also in the NYTimes, “In Europe, Fear of Ebola Exceeds the Actual Risks“:

… Across Europe, as in the United States, a virus that, outside Africa, has infected only a handful of people, all of them medical workers in hospitals treating Ebola patients, has stirred a wave of alarm that doctors and psychologists say reflects the insecurities of the modern mind far more than any significant danger to public health.

In Alcorcón, a town on the outskirts of Madrid where a Spanish nurse lived until she contracted Ebola virus while treating a sick priest, local businesses reported this week that their revenues had plummeted as customers stayed away. Among those hit by the scare was a hair salon where the nurse, María Teresa Romero Ramos, had gone for a waxing before she tested positive…

In Italy, which has had no confirmed cases yet of Ebola, the organizers of an international food fair in Turin asked delegates from Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia not to attend this year’s event, which opens next week. Paola Nano, a spokeswoman for Slow Food International, the sponsor of the fair, said that this was not because of any fear of contagion but only because they “might have problems getting here.”

Claudine Burton-Jeangros, a sociology professor at the University of Geneva, said that panic over the disease springs from a paradox at the heart of modern life: the more we master the world through science and technology the more frightened we are of those things we can’t control or understand. “We live in very secure societies and like to think we know what will happen tomorrow. There is no place in our rational and scientific world for the unknown.”…

The result has been a string of unfounded Ebola scares, which in some parts of Europe have led to entire buildings being sealed off and the people inside being held so they could be examined for symptoms…

In one particularly extreme example of overreaction, health authorities in Macedonia sealed off a hotel in the capital Skopje and kept its guests locked up there for days after a British businessman took ill in his room and died soon after being taken to the hospital. Doctors later said his problem was alcohol abuse and general ill health, not Ebola.

French authorities last week sealed off a building that houses a health and social security office in Cergy-Pontoise near Paris after two ill-looking Africans were spotted inside. They tested negative for Ebola…

Russian media, happy to report on a health crisis that has so far not challenged Russia’s already overextended health service, has given extensive coverage to alarm over the virus in Europe and the United States. At the same time, Africans living in Russia have also faced suspicion and scrutiny, as has been the case in Western Europe.

Even in Germany, which has seen little panic about Ebola, some newspapers have stoked alarm. Bild, a popular daily, reported that every second German is scared of getting infected. It gave no details of how it got the figure…

Dr. Petra Dickmann, who runs a risk-communication consultancy in London, said many other diseases pose a far bigger threat to life but Ebola had taken on fearsome dimensions.

“We have been watching Africans dying for months, but think that Africans die all the time from nasty diseases that we don’t have,” she said. “We need to get Ebola out of this box of a scary African monster” and start communicating the real risks clearly, she said.

Reader Interactions

29Comments

  3. 3.

    Debbie(aussie)

    Here in aus we are having a perverse argument about why our gov’t isn’t sending sanctioned workers, demountable hospitals and ships, NOW. While arguing about banning the bugha from Parliament house, all while listening to the finance minister with an Arnie like accent call the leader of the opposition a ‘girly man’ and try to defend it. Meteor we need it oh so bad. sigh…………..

  5. 5.

    jl

    I disagree with Markel that the Ebola panic recalls earlier epidemics of more than a hundred years ago, because back then, no one knew what the hell was going on, what exactly caused them or how to respond.

    Now we know. So, they had an excuse and we do not.

    We do have ruthless political operators who vilely exploit the few Ebola cases in the US for political gain, spreading absurd rumors about incompetence and conspiracy, smearing and slandering one of the premier disease control agencies in the world.

    We have worthless journalist like the crazed hick, partisan political hack and courtly gracious consummate professional and pillar of journalism, Bob jackass Schieffer who ran a real dog and pony show tody, and he is sadly, BETTER than most. Think of that, rancid worthless know-nothing gasbag like the Schief is better than most.

    WAAALLL Ahh dunno seems lahhkk Thawwyeee dooonnnn haavva cleewweeuuue whasa goin’ ooaaawwwnnnn!

    Then the ass wrap up his sow by letting some GOP loon have the last word.

  6. 6.

    Amir Khalid

    @Debbie(aussie):
    I have a mental sound-image now of Arnold Schwarzenegger (for that, BillinGlendaleCA, is the name) saying things like “G’day’, “Crikey” and “fair dinkum”. And only managing to sound even more Austrian.

  7. 7.

    PurpleGirl

    @Amir Khalid: Thank you for that image. It made me laugh, something I needed right now.

    (A friend died of a horrible cancer yesterday, 12 or so years younger than myself and it’s been hard to think of anything else since I learned of it about an hour after she passed. The ebola panic is absurd when people still die of cancer.)

  11. 11.

    Another Holocene Human

    @BillinGlendaleCA: He went out banging the help because she still had stars in her eyes when she saw him, unlike his Kennedy-clan i’m-so-political-now wife. It was all very Hollywood.

    At least he never started wearing hipster glasses a la Rick Perry. And please, Lord, let me never find out who he’s been banging.

  12. 12.

    Another Holocene Human

    @PurpleGirl: And suicide, and heart disease, and influenza, and Norwalk virus….

    Hugs, if you want them. It’s hard. It’s hard to accept. It’s hard to live with. And fuck anyone who tries to say otherwise. Cancer sucks.

  15. 15.

    NotMax

    One vote to give Ebolamania a rest, please?

    One thread bleeds (no pun intended) into another at this point. Getting very déjà vu-y.

  18. 18.

    AnonPhenom

    There’s a part of our brains that never evolved beyond a bunch of primates squatting on a patch of brush,

    For the ever lovin’ FSM, THIS.
    The “best healthcare in the world” compliments of “investors” and their beancounting lackies in institutional ‘Administration’ departments across the land. That privitization thing that happened to all the municipal hospitals in the late ’80s ?…..phuckin’ geniuses. Amirite?
    Spend money on equipment and staff training in preparation for low probability events with disastrous consequences? That might cost our investors as much as a dime per share! Unpossible!
    One day us monkyes will learn that the most important thing is NOT squeezing a sheckel out of every bloody aspect of our existence.

  19. 19.

    Sherparick

    The one thing I find in the article on Europe particularly irritating is the pontificating about the modern mind. The only thing modern about this Ebola panic is the modern mass media/internet, which spreads rumors, lies, and half truths at warp speed. Panic and flight has been the standard response to epidemics since people started writing history. (See Thuycides’ account of the plague of Athens in his “History of the the Peloponnesian War” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Athens.)

  20. 20.

    different-church-lady

    @jl:

    I disagree with Markel that the Ebola panic recalls earlier epidemics of more than a hundred years ago, because back then, no one knew what the hell was going on, what exactly caused them or how to respond.

    And your point is even better when you add in the fact that ten or hundreds of thousands of people actually fucking died in those epidemics.

    “Ebola is jerking us back to the 19th century,” he said. “It’s terrible. It’s isolating. It’s scary. You’re not connecting with other human beings, and you are fearful of a microbiologic time bomb ticking inside you.”

    Yes sir, that was really the worst part of cholera: the angst.

  21. 21.

    Patricia Kayden

    “Mr. Mann said an anonymous commentator on a local news website had suggested burning down his house.”

    Because that’s exactly what Jesus would have done.

  22. 22.

    MattF

    I’m just waiting for someone to go ahead and propose the “Exterminate all the brutes” policy. Maybe our pal Mr. Kincannon of SC will be the one.

  24. 24.

    PurpleGirl

    @AnonPhenom: Not all municipal hospitals were privatized. NYC still has an extensive health system — I know I’m a patient at one of the clinics. And NYC has been promoting its protocols for handling Ebola patients. This morning the conference of agency heads pertains to first responders and what they should do.

  26. 26.

    Elie

    Condolences to Purplegirl

    Y’all have me laughing this am. What a painful experience this has been and how ashamed we should be!
    Besides our 43 people who had early exposure now cleared, the Spanish nurse has tested negative for the virus, though judging from the article on Spanish fear she may have trouble going home.
    I am sick of the media who have earned an F- in trying to quell panic and misinformation. Even today the NYT seem to hold out the possibility that sealing the borders may be necessary! I am ready to vomit! And we are amazed that such things as the violence of Isis isn’t just a distilled version of our own hatred and fear

  29. 29.

    Elie

    BTW, the new hysterida – based on NO NEW INFORMATION is : is 21 days enough to assess people for exposure? We of course, don’t have the new “magic number” but 21 days is only the 95% confidence — not 100%. Of course, we don’t know what hits 100% or if it EVER hits 100% for the scairdy cats – but lets try, well how about 20 years?

    Jeezus I am going to just scream. No information related to real risk here, but an argument about whether could be is sure to happen…. Some Haas asshole someone dug up some “research” from. He didn’t have a clue on what the actual number ought to be?

Comments are closed.