Posted on 10/25/2014 5:12:21 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The biggest two words right now at the intersection of government and public health might be “travel ban.” But despite many politicians framing such a ban as a “common sense measure” to protect us from Ebola, a closer look at both the logistics and the history of such bans show that they are anything but.
First, what are these “travel bans” all about? They’re a moving target, and they’ve morphed a bit just in the last few days. Initially they were a call to ban flights from the affected countries—Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea—into the United States, in order to reduce the possibility that another person silently incubating the Ebola virus would show up in our cities. This is how Ebola entered Texas, via Thomas Eric Duncan, who had been exposed to the virus in Liberia before entering the United States to visit family. Visa restrictions have also been discussed. Would these bans make us safer?
Let’s take each potential model in turn:
1) Stopping flights to the affected countries Shutting down flights from these countries sounds straightforward. Unfortunately, what many proponents of such a flight ban didn’t realize was that there actually aren’t any direct flights from any of those countries into the United States. Nate Silver searched and identified direct flights from Senegal, Ghana and Nigeria, but none from Liberia, Sierra Leone or Guinea.
Most flights from the affected countries instead route through Europe or the Middle East, but even for those, Silver found, “In total, this represents just 18 weekly flights from Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone combined, nine of which are currently suspended or are not yet operating.”
Duncan was routed through Europe, flying out of Monrovia, the Liberian capital, to Brussels, Belgium, then on to Washington-Dulles Airport and finally to Dallas-Fort Worth.
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
“Travel Ban, Visa Ban—Either Way, It Won’t Work. The only way to stop Ebola is at the source.”
Why the OR??? Why ALWAYS the or???
What stops us from doing both (stopping tourist visas and helping West Africans at the same time)???
Perhaps some federal law, maybe???
I am sorry you do not appreciate my attempts to clarify issues that most people are unaware of, and to correct misconceptions. With all of the fearmongering and outright misinformation spreading out there, I figure that the truth and accuracy need strong advocates.
As the old saying goes, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”
Can you tell me why practices and policies based on the available scientific evidence are somehow a leftist thing? I always thought the left, not the right, is all about lies--am I wrong about that?
Agreed. Saying quarantines can’t keep everybody out, and therefore they’re no good is like saying because murders happen despite laws against it, let’s not even try to stop them. No logic to it. Liberal doctors just being p.c.
I think that's a cumulative case estimate, not an estimate of current active cases. The official WHO case total is now 10,141, including all cases since December 2013.
This headline, as well as the article, is a real abuse of logic and an artful creation of a straw man. First, of course the only way to defeat Ebola lies in stopping it in Africa to which we have invested much money and personnel. The intent of travel restrictions and quarantines is to keep it out of our country. This is a separate subject. We can do and should do both. BTW even though you wouldn’t know it from the progressive pundits, the USA is way out in front of the rest of the world in funding and sending personnel to fight Ebola in Africa. 750 million to runner up UK at 40 million and then we pay a lot of the UN bill.
so this mentally challenged writer proposes to do nothing...
we need some simple common sense test before people are allowed to vote.
Post to me or FReep mail to be on/off the Bring Out Your Dead ping list.
The purpose of the “Bring Out Your Dead” ping list (formerly the “Ebola” ping list) is very early warning of emerging pandemics, as such it has a high false positive rate.
So far the false positive rate is 100%.
At some point we may well have a high mortality pandemic, and likely as not the “Bring Out Your Dead” threads will miss the beginning entirely.
*sigh* Such is life, and death...
One wonders if ebola as a weapon isn’t already going to be an issue.
We are scrambling to stop Russian jets in our airspace in Alaska and Putin is threatening WWIII. The above aritcle shows their involvement in Ebola since around 1993.
Really? Well, to me “stop it at the source” sure sounds like “keep it over there.”. Sure sounds like travel ban to me. Unless somehow importing infected people is intentional.
If inbound quarantines of those who’ve had contact with Ebola in the West African nations won’t work, then why do we continue to track secondary contacts with U.S. citizens who’ve had contact with those arriving infected from West Africa and then quarantine those people? You know, if quarantines don’t work.
Wouldn’t it be far less expensive and far safer to quarantine far fewer people at the point of arrival before they contact hundreds or even thousands after the fact?
The number of new cases for each existing infection is still nearly 2x. That means the maximum number of future cases is still ahead, not behind us, and will remain so until the new infection rate goes well below 1x for an extended period of time.
CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR)
Neither WHO, nor the CDC regard the number of existing or future cases as "few." My point stands.
The 0banoids just cannot accept that they have made errors. Everything that they did not think of MUST be wrong because they are infallible. They are believe in their own dogmatic BS and their cultist leader.
Obviously, all efforts need to directed at curtailing and eliminating Ebola in hot zones. But that does not mean excluding other effective efforts at preventing Ebola vectors from entering unaffected lesser affected areas.
This all about keeping the borders open to undocumented democrats. The vote of one undocumented democrat is worth more than the life of one American.
I hope the writer is not as stupid as he pretends. The point is to ban people with passports from those three countries, and stop issuing visas to people in those three countries.
I agree that this will not stop 100% of infected people from coming here, but even stopping 98% of infected people is real progress. A lot of things that are not perfect are still worth doing (such as sealing the Mexican border to keep criminals, including those with Ebola, from entering illegally). Reducing the flow of potentially diseased travelers is another worthwhile decision that is not perfect but still far better than any alternative.
Does the possibility of, say, 5 or more asymptomatic EVD carriers arriving at the same time in NYC for example, and later becoming symptomatic and testing Ebola-positive and creating a combined contact list of maybe 500-plus people, exceed the CDC and local tracing capabilities and cause an even greater emergency containment responce issue?:
“Eventually, however (if the outbreak in Africa is not brought under control), the United States will experience saturation of its contact-tracing capabilities. Incoming cases will saturate our response, and Ebola cases will eventually fly ‘under the radar’ for one to three incubation periods until the index case can no longer be identified through contact tracing. At this point, if the virus’s effective reproduction number is sufficiently high (>1), the Ebola virus will be very difficult to stop within the U.S”:
The number of new cases for each existing infection is still nearly 2x. That means the maximum number of future cases is still ahead, not behind us, and will remain so until the new infection rate goes well below 1x for an extended period of time.
Not really, there is a big difference in the number of potential secondary cases if there are 1,000 currently active cases vs. 10,000.
In any case, I am glad the military is going in to help with the outbreak. They should have been there months ago, before it got so big.
BTW, have you considered that the CDC might be... well, overstating the numbers a bit to try to get more funding?
I haven't been to West Africa recently, but it used to be that stamping passports was a hit or miss thing. Many stamps are illegible, skipped, smeared, or otherwise not obvious evidence of travel to that country. Still, stopping the issuance of new visas, cancelling existing visas, and checking for passport origin and stamps (do you know how much time that would take, since pages are not stamped neatly and in order?) is a good start and should be policy. BTW, it won't happen. To this White House, it's more important to pretend that open borders are a good thing, so Obama can let in more undocumented democrats, than it is to protect the lives of Americans.
“I figure that the truth and accuracy need strong advocates.”
Continually spamming threads about methods of transmission that have yet to be quantified by practitioners and researchers working in the field is hardly “accuracy or truth”. The bald face truth is Ebola is an evolving threat that has been positively shown to undermine protocols set forth by our very “elite” and monumentally expensive federal entities the CDC and NIH.
Being indignant about quarantine protocols and espousing “truth” does not make it so.
I happen to be a research scientist with a lot of education and experience in this area. I have never said anything that is not supported in the scientific literature, and I am always willing to provide references to back up anything I say. The information I have provided on mode of transmission is absolutely accurate, and supported by research.
The thing about the scientific world, is that we constantly discuss how things are done, and if they could be done better. We always try to improve things. Ebola really has not significantly changed, but what is clear when a situation like Dallas comes up and two nurses infect themselves is that communication, education, whatever, fell down somewhere along the way. The protocols are sound, people have been responding to Ebola outbreaks for decades without getting infected. So, when a couple of nurses get infected, we need to understand what went wrong so as to prevent it from happening again.
The so-called elites at CDC who put forth the protocols do so in conjunction with the Ebola experts--you know, those people at the research institutions who work with it on a daily basis.
Heck of a job Brownie!
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