Liberians Dumping Ebola Victims' Corpses on the Street, Rather Than Reporting the Infection

Because if they report the infection, they themselves will be placed in government-run quarantine camps, which they view as "death-traps."

There's no easy way out of this. I'm pretty sure most rational people don't want to be put in a quarantine camp where most people are in fact infected with Ebola, or else soon will be.

So their survival instinct tells them to avoid quarantine -- and thereby they expose many other people.

However, it seems they're not even right about this idea that they'll be immediately shipped to a quarantine ward "death trap." In fact, the first step is a quarantine inside their own home:

In Liberia's ramshackle ocean-front capital Monrovia, still scarred by a 1989-2003 civil war, relatives of Ebola victims were dragging bodies onto the dirt streets rather than face quarantine, officials said.

Information Minister Lewis Brown said some people may be alarmed by regulations imposing the decontamination of victims' homes and the tracking of their friends and relatives. With less than half of those infected surviving the disease, many Africans regard Ebola isolation wards as death traps.

"They are therefore removing the bodies from their homes and are putting them out in the street. They're exposing themselves to the risk of being contaminated," Brown told Reuters. "We're asking people to please leave the bodies in their homes and we'll pick them up."

So this seems to be based largely on misinformation.

And look: If you do have Ebola, it's not the Ebola ward that is a primary threat to you.

Meanwhile, that woman in Ohio who was tested for Ebola? Her results came back -- not positive.

Which is of course is good, despite the weird way that sounds.

A lot more from Instapundit, with both more-worrying and less-worrying speculations.

posted by Ace at 01:21 PM

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