Posted on 10/16/2014 5:51:17 AM PDT by shortstop
We have screwed the pooch.
With this ebola thing, it is hard to imagine how we could have been more incompetent.
Our stupidity has killed one patient and infected two nurses, and left a nation suddenly unsure of the reliability of its health care system.
For all the cocky assurances and arrogant assertions, it turns out that primitives with dust masks are better at caring for ebola patients than we are with our isolations units and high-tech doo-dads.
In the treatment of one patient, the American hospital system has infected more health care workers than would be infected by the treatment of hundreds of Africans.
It is almost inconceivable.
Let’s review the chain of calamity.
A man who self-diagnosed as having ebola, and who informed a nurse that he had recently traveled to the United States from Liberia, was misdiagnosed and sent home to allow his disease to fester and potentially spread to dozens.
When an ambulance brought him back two days later, we now learn that he lay in an open emergency department essentially unattended and spreading his contagion for hours.
And that somehow through the course of his treatment – until his death to the disease – two nurses operating under strict contagious-disease guidelines became infected with ebola.
How does that happen?
How do we, with our moon suits and boy-in-the-bubble technology, catch this deadly disease when doctors and nurses in Africa, working with far fewer assets and much less technology, largely avoid it?
What went wrong?
And why are we worrying about the fate of a nurse’s dog when what the UN is calling potentially the worst epidemic of the modern era is knocking at our door?
About that. Though the UN isn’t staffed by the smartest kids in class, and warnings do tend to be alarmist, it is worrisome that health officials at the United Nations think this ebola outbreak has the potential to rival AIDS and the Spanish flu of 1918.
Only time will tell about predictions. And only time will tell if the incompetence at the CDC and Texas Health Presbyterian are representative of the rest of the American health care system.
Ebola is controlled by diagnosis and isolation. You diagnose patients and those exposed, and you isolate them from the rest of the population.
We failed to do that in Dallas.
And then we got dumber.
The second nurse to be announced as sick with ebola, concerned about her temperature and an approaching trip to Ohio, called the CDC, informed the person she spoke of her work with an ebola patient and her own fever, and asked if she should fly on a commercial airliner or not.
Think that through.
You’ve been around an ebola guy. Coincidentally, a co-worker of yours has just been in the news for coming down with ebola, and you’ve got a fever, and you want to know if you should fly commercial.
That’s the question laid before a CDC official.
That’s a question almost everyone in America would have gotten right.
But a question which the CDC got wrong.
It told the nurse that, though her temperature was bad, it wasn’t bad enough. So she was free to fly.
And she did, from Ohio to Texas, while arguably contagious for ebola.
That’s the kind of stupidity that gets people killed. That’s the kind of leadership the CDC is giving us. That’s the kind of direction our nation is getting in the fight against ebola.
And it raises a question.
If a state-of-the-art hospital in one of America’s largest cities can so fail in its handling of an ebola patient, then what about the hospital in your town? Do you live in Magicville, where mistakes are never made? Are all your doctors and nurses just smarter?
And what about the CDC?
When a federal agency clears a likely ebola sufferer to fly on a commercial jetliner, you have to wonder how engaged it is, and how it will avoid such stupidity in the future.
Finally, there is the issue of the president’s order to send some 3,000 American soldiers and Marines into western Africa to help fight ebola.
If we can’t protect our health care workers in isolation units in America, how are we going to protect GIs operating in the open air in Liberia?
If you send 3,000 Americans into the cauldron of contagion, don’t you expect that some of them are going to come home sick?
And what are you going to do with GIs who catch ebola? Do they get treated where they are? Are they shipped off to military hospitals in Germany? Do they come back home for treatment?
And if they do come back home for treatment, how will we keep the nurses from catching it?
It seems like sending troops to fight ebola is a pretty good way to bring that virus into the heart of our population.
Seems like if we wanted to keep this contagion out of our society we would tell folks coming from affected areas that they have to sit out an incubation period over there before they can come over here.
But we’re not doing that.
We’re screwing around taking temperatures at airports and pretending that this will be a piece of cake.
We’re pretending that ebola is nothing.
That’s what our words say.
Though, thus far, our actions say something else completely.
Our actions say we’re in trouble.
The problem is letting these people in in the first place. Expecting nurses and everyone to act perfectly while letting these people come over here is absurd. The problem is not imperfect nurses - it is a raving lunatic named Barack Hussein Obama. Also 10% of the ebola deaths in Africa are health care workers so they are not miracle workers either.
I suspect his historical moniker will be President Obola -— he kills everything he touches. Think about everything he’s gotten involved with (even the Dem party who is now treating him like a deadly virus!) .... it’s all worse off, in flames or destroyed.
I feel for her seatmates. If it were me, I would be up all night, trying to remember if she coughed, sneezed, wiped her nose, if I took her empty glass or wet napkin and handed it to the flight attendant.
This administration sickens me.
I’s be worried, too.
Although the odds are good that nobody caught it from her at this stage, I’d also be isolated from my family. Period.
OTOH, this will cause West Africa to have second thoughts about flying it over here.
Duncan’s lies would have been irrelevant had the Klown not been a traitor.
The DNC were on this path long before Nancy changed the 2008 Hawaiian candidate form. Of course, this has been deliberately planned and by many.
She had a fever; therefore she was symptomatic.
We are not just merely screwed; we are most sincerely screwed.
Sadly we will all pay for their stupidity. Ebola doesn’t respect party lines, I wish it did.
With this ebola thing, it is hard to imagine how our "leaders" could have been anything but incompetent (if you are charitable enough to assume this was merely incompetence).
When do the adults get to be back in charge?? This is not the America I remember growing up in!
Bttt
A link to this thread has been posted on the Ebola Surveillance Thread
“It is not incompetence. No Administration could possibly be as incompetent as the Obama Administration pretends to be.
This is treason.”
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I agree with the first part but I must take issue with the treason charge. In my understanding treason means to betray your country and go over to the enemy side. If you have been on the enemy side all along you cannot switch over. I think the correct word is something like infiltrator.
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