Chicken Little Doesn’t Have Ebola After All

The Ebola panic in the United States has dramatically outgrown the Ebola virus itself. Were it not for the death of a man initially turned away from Presbyterian Health Hospital in Dallas, the panic would be a massive exercise in comedy. The hysteria would have been hysterical.

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A man in Florida got drunk in a bar, which is probably the place you would expect that. As police showed up to remove him, he is accused of trying to scare them off by saying he was infected with Ebola. They took him in, had him medically examined, and determined that he was full of something other than the disease. He might be full of sand, but he did not have Ebola.

Falsely claiming to have an infectious disease is apparently a crime in Florida, a law more sensible than some legal standards in that state. So the fellow was taken to court to face charges. The judge read the charge, saw the word “Ebola” and immediately cleared the courtroom. Prisoners, everybody except the man who had been determined to be uninfected, were taken out into a hallway. Presumably His Honor eventually figured out that over-reacting to every false claim was no way to administer the justice system.

A teacher in Maine had the misfortune of visiting Dallas for an educational conference when the Ebola virus was reported. She had been ten miles away from Presbyterian Health Hospital. But the school told her she could not come back to class for three weeks. Gotta be safe, you know.

In Mississippi, a Middle School principal went to Zambia in Africa for his brother’s funeral. Zambia is 3,000 miles away from any country with any citizen with any sign of the Ebola virus. But so many parents protested, the principal evacuated himself, taking personal leave to avoid more panic.

Nobody knows yet how to eradicate the Ebola virus. There is no vaccine. But substantial research has been done. There is a lot known about it. It is not airborne, despite hysterical claims by Fox News pundits. It is deadly and infectious up close when someone has symptoms. It can’t be caught at a distance. The quarantine period is 3 weeks, but if symptoms don’t appear within a few days, the danger is over.

Still, there are legitimate concerns.

The Center for Disease Control is a considerable reservoir of knowledge. Their experts are very good at training and preparing local medical people. But they did not impose themselves in Texas until Presbyterian Health Hospital requested their help.

That hospital had been astonishingly casual about the training and preparation that had been recommended for months by the CDC. Even after it became evident they had a serious situation on their hands, they were breathtakingly lax. Hazmat suits were not provided for days to nurses working directly with the first Ebola patient. When they were provided, they did not fit properly. The head portion would not connect to the rest of each suit. So they were sort of stitched together with tape.

Duct tape is a wonderful invention. It is the Swiss Army Knife of adhesion. It can be used for almost anything. So the hospital left its nurses to fight Ebola with duct tape.

We need to re-examine our current system of private care. For-profit medical facilities can be expected, like any free enterprise institution, to be primarily motivated by profit. To weigh life and death risk against this year’s bottom line may not be the best method for the next possible pandemic.

We can only imagine the first conversation that prefaced the first signs of that first fatality.

“May I see your insurance card?”
“I just arrived from Liberia.”
“That’s nice. Your insurance card, please?”
“I’m very ill and I’ve been in a country with the Ebola virus.”
“Do you have insurance?”

What will happen next time, when an actual pandemic becomes a real possibility?

It is the campaign season, and Republicans do like to campaign on fear. Some have dropped ISIS as an imminent danger to ordinary citizens in favor of Ebola. A few have ingeniously combined the two with hatred of immigrants. The Rube Goldberg invention is a hybrid fear that terrorists may have infected themselves with Ebola, and infiltrated the United States by entering Mexico and coming across the border with all those kids.

Republicans had once thought policy “czars” were a fine thing. Those were the days when President George W. Bush appointed them. Then Republicans opposed the entire czar concept as soon as President Obama followed the same practice. Then they demanded that President Obama appoint a czar to deal with the Ebola crisis. When he did, they went back to protesting against the appointment.

They were for it before they were against it before they were for it before they were against it.

The thought for a while was that Ebola might provide enough boost for a Republican wave election. It still might.

But the timing could be a little off. News of hair-on-fire fear is being supplanted. Headline writers are turning to stories about genuinely exposed people coming to the end of their 21 day quarantine, free of symptoms. The rest of those in the US who contracted the virus are recovering, reading about themselves on the front page.

The evidence so far is that citizens, for all their Night-of-the-Living-Dead panic, might not be changing their votes. The Texas Chainsaw medi-scare may be approaching the closing credits. The public Ebola binge may leave only a next-morning hangover.

It is possible the fever is about to break.

This article is a collaboration between MadMikesAmerica and FairandUnbalanced.

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