Imagine you’ve managed to contract Malaria. And you’re also prone to airsickness. Your life may become very very interesting when you travel.
“Chinese people fleeing Ebola, angry Africans, understaffed flight crew, rumors and fears: the Air France flight from Freetown to Paris seemed to encapsulate the global panic in the face of the Ebola outbreak.
Anecdotes swirl around the cabin: apparently the same flight a few days ago carried three ill children, one with fever, two with diarrhea. Could be Ebola, could be harmless childhood sickness, who knows? In any case, as the story goes, passengers asked to move seats.
And it’s not just the passengers who are fearful. The crew is short-staffed because employees are not exactly beating down the door of the Airbus A330 to fly to or from Ebola-hit West Africa.
Air France is one of the few airlines still flying to affected countries, as nations close their borders for fear of the outbreak that has claimed around 1,350 lives.
No one wore masks on the 20-minute hop between Freetown and Conakry (180 kilometers, 110 miles), nor the long-haul flight to Paris that landed early Thursday morning. But the nervousness was palpable, even if the atmosphere was calm.
“I had to close my textiles shop to go back to China,” sighed Wu Guo Gang, 60, fleeing the Ebola outbreak with his wife.
They explained they had left behind the fruits of a decade of work building up a business that employs three people.
“Lots of Chinese are leaving. If they stay, they might die,” he added. “We hope that Europe and the United States will soon find a good cure to solve the (Ebola) problem.” “
WA will suffer the economic effects of this for a long time. Those effects are why the governments waited so long to impose measures to control the outbreak. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.