For understanding why our official medicos and politicos are mishandling the Ebola threat so badly, read The Plague by Camus again, and reflect that it was based on ancient human impulses that never change. Look at the 1918-19 flu for some other lessons. Millions died. Very big mistakes were made and important lessons learned, most of them forgotten.
The “good news” in this mess is that the cities that get hit first and worst by Ebola will provide lessons for the rest of us. I think we will learn the hard way to segregate standard hospitals from fever/Ebola treatment centers. Admitting a flood of Ebola patients is a sure way to nuke a hospital as effectively as a bio-weapon WMD attack over time. The hospital will be contaminated and much of the staff dead, of the ones who didn’t run away early.
Eventually we’ll see newly-created fever camps become the only refuge available to anybody showing flu symptoms. Hospitals will turn them away, maybe with police assistance and the offer of a handy bus driven by a fellow in a haz-mat suit to take them to their new/last home. What’s behind Door Number Two? Don’t worry, you’ll find out later. Maybe you only have the still-spreading Enterovirus D-68, AKA the Guatemalan Flu. You won’t know for sure until your eyeballs are bleeding. Unless maybe you caught the big-E from the guy vomiting on the next cot over. Maybe you just had a nasty cold when they brought you in last week.
And this begs the question, what happens when 1 or 2% of a city have died: who will go to work? People will self-quarantine at home and the economy will crash. And what about the police, fire fighters, EMTs, and hospital crews? What about the crews down at your local power plant, or food distribution center? Think they will all become Mother Teresas, martyring alongside the lepers for the greater good? Think they will not stay home?
Read the rest here...
http://bit.ly/1vpxNEp
The “good news” in this mess is that the cities that get hit first and worst by Ebola will provide lessons for the rest of us. I think we will learn the hard way to segregate standard hospitals from fever/Ebola treatment centers. Admitting a flood of Ebola patients is a sure way to nuke a hospital as effectively as a bio-weapon WMD attack over time. The hospital will be contaminated and much of the staff dead, of the ones who didn’t run away early.
Eventually we’ll see newly-created fever camps become the only refuge available to anybody showing flu symptoms. Hospitals will turn them away, maybe with police assistance and the offer of a handy bus driven by a fellow in a haz-mat suit to take them to their new/last home. What’s behind Door Number Two? Don’t worry, you’ll find out later. Maybe you only have the still-spreading Enterovirus D-68, AKA the Guatemalan Flu. You won’t know for sure until your eyeballs are bleeding. Unless maybe you caught the big-E from the guy vomiting on the next cot over. Maybe you just had a nasty cold when they brought you in last week.
And this begs the question, what happens when 1 or 2% of a city have died: who will go to work? People will self-quarantine at home and the economy will crash. And what about the police, fire fighters, EMTs, and hospital crews? What about the crews down at your local power plant, or food distribution center? Think they will all become Mother Teresas, martyring alongside the lepers for the greater good? Think they will not stay home?
Read the rest here...
http://bit.ly/1vpxNEp
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