Daily Beast Column: New York & New Jersey’s Ebola Quarantines Are an Insane Overreaction

With the West African Ebola epidemic still raging out of control, killing 20 people a day in Sierra Leone alone, Americans, confronted with their first few cases, are taking on the tough questions: Can Ebola be transmitted by a bowling ball? What about co-location in a hipster coffee bar near the High Line? And—OMG—what about Uber-based transmission?

Right on cue, as if in an attempt to push the discussion ever further toward irrelevancy, the twin towers of presidential posturing, Governors Chris Christie and Andrew Cuomo, agreed to hog the spotlight together in order to get presidentially tough over an issue that needed no decisiveness at all: What to do about the small trickle of health-care volunteers who return to the States from West Africa? Tired, apparently, of all the goddamned evidenced-based pussy-footing coming from people who understand science and public health, the Two Big Guys made their kick-butt pronouncement: They are throwing those weenie volunteers into the 21-day slammer, no ifs or ands or buts. Goddammit.

With this they are further tarring the poor schmuck who is fighting off a life-threatening infection: Dr. Craig Spencer. Remember him? Remember 55 percent death rates from Ebola? Yet Spencer’s current predicament has taken a distant back seat to the pressing worries of 8 million people who are at zero risk but appear to want to feel threatened. It is an odd inversion—dumping on a guy who is sick and at real risk for death and maybe a little heroic (after all, he chose to go to Guinea to help the dying, chaotic masses) and focusing instead on his “selfish disregard for the public” as he traipsed across the subway system to access the cultured and well-turned-out parallel world of Brooklyn and its contents.

I’m absolutely just fine with the quarantine location being moved to this reporter’s house, with a big sign above the door stating that persons in this household are being quarantined for exposure to the Ebola virus, and any others entering the quarantine zone are also exposed and therefore under the same quarantine.

Seriously, this affects a very tiny percentage of people, most of whom are well aware of the dangers of this virus, and we’ve yet to hear exactly how the two Dallas nurses contracted the disease. Want to end this type of thing? Figure out how they got infected.

The article describes a typical American reaction when faced with either no information or contradictory information about a crises.

Let me be plain — Ebola is a true pandemic not at all like the artificial pandemics we have seen over the last 30 odd years.

Looking at historical records from the last real pandemic in the 20th Century, the Spanish Flu Pandemic 1918-1920 there are some things that need to be repeated. The Spanish flu infected an estimated 500 million people - world wide. The world’s population in 1920 was estimated at 2 billion; 500 million represented 25% of the world’s total population. Of the estimated 500 million of those infected between 50 and 100 million died. That’s a mortality rate of 10 to 20 percent.

This strain of Ebola has a reported morality rate of 50 to 70 %. In today’s numbers the number infected could reach as high as 1.7 billion with the final death toll of between 850 million and 1.24 billion. Or it could be as low as between 170 and 340 million. Or it could be as low as a few thousand. Who really knows what track this pandemic will follow?

Given the potential numbers, we need to look back at what was successful during the last pandemic. And that was an effective maritime quarantine. Those nations which were less impacted had an effective maritime quarantine; those with the greatest impact didn’t. Look at the historical records of Western and American Samoa - two islands separated by 40 miles of open ocean. BTW - remember that 100 years ago steamships were the intercontinental jet liners of their day.

I most sincerely hope that my worries are just that. I pray that my numbers are off scale high by several orders of magnitude. If not; my nightmares are truly horrific and I will not repeat them here or anywhere else.

IF all things are 100% right on what it takes before Ebola is an actively “communicable” virus, it MIGHT be an over reaction.

But in as much as medicine is supposed to first “do no harm” and in as much as security is a first order priority of government, then prudence might say a little over reaction might be better, especially given an equal possibility that Ebola could still mutate and do so in ways that improve its means of spreading. Why take unnecessary chances?

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