CDC, feds rethinking Ebola strategy after Texas failure

Hot Air.com ^ | October 14, 2014 | ED MORRISEY

[Kaslin]

The Obama administration has begun to acknowledge that it was unprepared for the potential emergence of Ebola in the US after a Texas nurse contracted the disease. After weeks of issuing statements that they would have no problem in containing any cases that might emerge, the CDC said that it would “rethink” its approach after the first case resulted in failure. They also acknowledged the very real possibility that others have already been infected in Texas:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Monday said it is starting to “rethink” its Ebola strategy after the first-ever US transmission of the virus put a “relatively large” number of healthcare workers at risk.

“We’re concerned, and unfortunately would not be surprised if we did see additional [Ebola] cases in healthcare workers who also provided care to the index patient,” CDC Director Tom Frieden said.

A nurse at Texas Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas was diagnosed with Ebola over the weekend, raising questions about the procedures that were followed when treating Thomas Eric Duncan.

The nurse’s infection “doesn’t change the fact that its possible to take care of Ebola safely, but it does change, substantially, how we approach it,” Frieden said.

[I want the USA back]

Stop travel to and from infected countries. Admit that it’s transmitted in the air.

[bigtoona]

No need to be worried citizen! We have it under control, please ignore the fact that we had 70 hospital workers caring for this one Ebola patient. At that rate we can handle maybe 2 or even 3 Ebola patients at once!

[NRA1995]

This administration and this Congress are NEVER prepared for anything!

[Travis McGee]

The feds will always be two or three steps behind.

When Ferguson Meets Ebola

For understanding why our official medicos and politicos are mishandling the Ebola threat so badly, read The Plague by Camus again, and reflect that it was based on ancient human impulses that never change. Look at the 1918-19 flu for some other lessons. Millions died. Very big mistakes were made and important lessons learned, most of them forgotten. The “good news” in this mess is that the cities that get hit first and worst by Ebola will provide lessons for the rest of us. I think we will learn the hard way to segregate standard hospitals from fever/Ebola treatment centers. Admitting a flood of Ebola patients is a sure way to nuke a hospital as effectively as a bio-weapon WMD attack over time. The hospital will be contaminated and much of the staff dead, of the ones who didn’t run away early.

Eventually we’ll see newly-created fever camps become the only refuge available to anybody showing flu symptoms. Hospitals will turn them away, maybe with police assistance and the offer of a handy bus driven by a fellow in a haz-mat suit to take them to their new/last home. What’s behind Door Number Two? Don’t worry, you’ll find out later. Maybe you only have the still-spreading Enterovirus D-68, AKA the Guatemalan Flu. You won’t know for sure until your eyeballs are bleeding. Unless maybe you caught the big-E from the guy vomiting on the next cot over. Maybe you just had a nasty cold when they brought you in last week.

And this begs the question, what happens when 1 or 2% of a city have died: who will go to work? People will self-quarantine at home and the economy will crash. And what about the police, fire fighters, EMTs, and hospital crews? What about the crews down at your local power plant, or food distribution center? Think they will all become Mother Teresas, martyring alongside the lepers for the greater good? Think they will not stay home? But even in the resulting economic crash, unfairness will be ferreted out. Is it fair that some people have prepared, and have several months-worth of food on hand? Is that fair, when the supermarkets were all looted in the general panic, and there have been no more food deliveries, and the EBT system is not functioning? Is it fair that some, who have prepared, will be able to simply ride out the Ebola pandemic?

So the already latently violent among the starving will be very motivated to come out and play. Starving goblins, millions of them. What about the goblins who may think they have already contracted Ebola, and have a week until they die? Or if they believe they will certainly contract the deadly virus soon? And what if they firmly believe by then that Ebola was a CIA/Mossad plot to wipe out Africans and people of African ancestry? Many American blacks are already angry. What happens to that anger when the epidemic strikes them? What happens when Ebola comes to Ferguson, USA, across most of the fifty states? Already brainwashed to a near fever-pitch of racial anger by professional agitators, it is my fear that after the plague hits they will then become super-beyond-belief pissed, and eager to share their case of Ebola with any white overlords and oppressors who come in range as their final act.

If you thought you were going to die in a week, most painfully and horribly, and you already had a giant hate-on for whitey, what might you do as some of your very final acts upon this earth? What will flash mobs of people that angry do? For just one example, home invasions in search of food and perceived retribution, will explode.

Talk about your perfect social storms. No, worse. Talk about your zombie apocalypse.

I’ll say it again: Alas, Brave New Babylon.

[Raycpa]

So its not the nurses fault?

[Lurker]

A real Black Swan event is possible. And if it does it sure as hell won’t be pretty.

[SkyPilot]

I watched first episode of The Walking Dead, season 1. The scene where Sheriff Rick wakes up fro a coma in a hospital, and the hospital is a war zone where bodies lay everywhere, stack like cord wood, covered in flies, and burned out military and police riot gear in ruins, seemed almost prophetic.

[bgill]

FOX has been raking Frieden over the coals all morning.

[Sacajaweau]

They will first have to lie their a** off and say it’s mutated.

[Pearls Before Swine]

“Obama lied, people died.”

Doesn’t that have a familiar ring to it?

[mad_as_he$$]

Nothing cuts through BS like dead bodies.

[Travis McGee]

Once you understand them, they are not really Black Swans. People just missed the linkages.

Here’s an example from my essay “Trapping Feral Pigs and Other Parables of Modern Life.”

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2949909/posts?page=35

6. The Rat Flood

This occurs in northeastern India and parts of Burma. Only in the last century was this bizarre cycle of human famine following unexplained super plagues of rats finally understood. It turns out that forests of a certain bamboo species go into a wild explosion of fruiting, producing seed nuts on a 48-year cycle, a trick of nature that had been missed until the middle of the 20th century. Intrigued by the half-century cycle of human famines reported in 1862, 1911, and 1959, modern scientists finally noticed the link between the famines and the bamboo tree cycle. By 2006, the next time the bamboo began to fruit, they were on hand to observe the complete phenomenon.

The superabundance of nuts every 48 years leads to an explosion in the population of Asian black rats, which live in the bamboo forests. Because of their rapid breeding cycle, the number of rats per acre shoots up to astronomical levels, eventually the entire mega-crop of nuts is consumed, and a lemming-like mass starvation follows.

Millions of starving rats break out from the forests in what the local people call the Rat Flood. The onrushing solid tide of scurrying rats destroys entire crops in the ground and attack unprotected granaries, leading to an immediate human famine. Millions of dying, dead and decaying rats add to the misery by polluting streams and causing other intensely nasty sanitary problems. A once-every-48-years bamboo nut super-fruiting leads to millions of rats and then to human famine.

The moral of the story: If subtle connections are missed, a radical new situation may at first wrongly be considered a Black Swan Event. But sometimes the Black Swans can be seen in advance, if seemingly unconnected links and mechanisms are properly understood in advance. And if you’re not sure what a Black Swan Event is, you definitely need to read the book.

[Cringing Negativism Network]

Good post.

People stop travel to and from infected countries.

Now.

[Lurker]

Fascinating. Thanks very much.

[Mouton]

The CDC rethink is nothing more than Obola finding out his idea of what to do, which he foisted upon the CDC, is not playing out well with the masses. So, Frieden, coincidently after his CC with Obola yesterday, comes out an says they are rethinking their protocols. This is nothing more than Barry putting distance between his ideas and the person who gets the blame. I wonder whom the next CDC chief will be? Of course, like a good commie, Frieden will never say he thought Barry’s ideas were wrong unless he wants to head to Ft Marcy Park or it his case the Chatahoochie River.

[Alas Babylon!]

We experienced a Rat Flood in 2008 and are still suffering from the effects 6 years later.

[DoodleDawg]

Admit that it’s transmitted in the air.

Even if it isn't?

[Resolute Conservative]

If I catch it I am driving to DC as fast as I can and walk through Congress and the DC news outlets rubbing snot on every door knob and hand rail I can. I would be sad I could not get into the WH.

[petercooper]

bttt