And think about our military in the middle.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is quietly developing its own capability to removed infected military members (and other westerners) from the hot zone:
http://formerspook.blogspot.com/
The blog post (and linked article) are interesting for a couple of reasons. First, the U.S. government already has a contract with Phoenix Air, which has the only medically-approved system for medevacing Ebola patients in the world, and the company can guarantee up to four flights a week for the feds, carrying a single patient on each mission.
Meanwhile, DoD is contracting for isolation pods that will fit into a C-130 or C-17, and can carry anywhere from 8-15 infected individuals. The feds wouldn’t be developing this capability unless there was an expected need, and apparently, they anticipate a number of our troops will wind up with Ebola.
There’s also a question of where infected military members would be taken for treatment. There are only 11 beds—nationwide—in the four facilities that are fully equipped to handle Ebola patients. A single planeload of military evacuees would swamp the system. I believe some would wind up at the NIH facility in Washington, and the rest would be sent to Walter Reed. I don’t believe any military hospital is better prepared for Ebola than civilian facilities, with the exception of the USAMRIID at Fort Detrick, and its a research center and not a treatment facility.
The military is the perfect environment for spreading the virus—close living quarters, ill-informed, moving around on different tours of duty, etc.