Health Officials Now Monitoring 100 Ebola Contacts, Up From "12-18"

This is how outbreaks happen, of course.

The good news is that they say they are tracking this man "out of an abundance of caution." This is one of this PR-obsessed Administration's favorite phrases, but it may be justified here. They say the list of 100 includes people who had limited contact with Duncan (or with one of the kids Duncan may have infected). They are not high threats for infection.

Contrast that with four people who had close contact with Duncan now being ordered to stay at home.

I don't know who those four are, but anyone who was in the apartment Duncan was staying at, or in the ambulance that brought him to the hospital, are at much higher risk. Per Reuters:

Two days after he was sent home from a Dallas hospital, the man who is the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola in the United States was seen vomiting on the ground outside an apartment complex as he was bundled into an ambulance. …

"His whole family was screaming. He got outside and he was throwing up all over the place," resident Mesud Osmanovic, 21, said on Wednesday, describing the chaotic scene...

Apparently Duncan had direct physical contact with an ebola patient shortly before he got on that plane. He was helping to move a pregnant woman infected with the disease.

I know a lot of people are going to say "We should criminalize that, the failure to inform about contact with an infectious person when applying for a Visa."

The trouble is this works into the deadly gameplan of the virus, which is to turn humans into its willing coconspirators. If you threaten punishments for lying, people will just conceal their symptoms more, and thereby remain free to infect more people.

The threat of a punishment is counter-productive (and may actually work in ebola's favor).

This Administration has to admit that its screening at airports is just taking someone's temperature and is almost entirely useless.

Remember Security Theater at the TSA? Well this is just Public Health Theater, and it's not even a lot of theater besides.

But Obama won't do that until there's an enormous crisis which starts making itself be felt in polling.

See TMI3rd's midnight update from last night for more.

posted by Ace at 11:32 AM

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