When I’ve seen the more elaborately equipped medical personnel using self contained breathing apparatus and oxygen tanks when dealing with these patients and I compare the statements of ‘it’s not airborne just droplets’ with the reality of the docs in space suits...I ask myself what the folks with the oxygen tanks know that we don’t?
The rhetoric does not meet the reality we’re seeing daily.
Another question: if Ebola is that difficult to contract, why is research on the virus limited to Level 4 laboratories?
The information being offered is so wildly different from what people are seeing in the video and reading on news sites, one has to wonder who believes that the rhetoric is going to overcome the images.
The day I see nursing staff and physicians in an Ebola treatment ward wearing no more than a surgical mask, goggles and pair of nitrile gloves, is the day I’ll give the rhetoric another look, starting with published studies demonstrating the difficulty of becoming infected via fomites, droplets, etc.
I suspect I’ll be waiting a long while.
What they know, and the rest of us in medical professions know is that the viremia in an infected patient--the quantity of virus in a given quantity of blood--is very high compared to other bloodborne diseases, but the number of virus particles needed to cause infection is very low, around 10. If you are working with a patient who has millions of viruses per milliter of blood, and a tiny drop of blood too small to be seen contains enough virus to cause deadly disease--well, you'd probably want to cover up, too.