So they're bringing a physician who's been infected to our local hospital's new biocontainment unit, and every story about it is spawning some choice awfulness in the comments.
I swear every time someone tries to bring facts into those discussions they're instantly shut down by screeching panic addicts. It's simultaneously beautiful and horrific to watch.
I'm pretty much on their side at this point. I mean when you have diplomats and doctors actively and stupidly infecting 'X' people because 'fuck quarantine', I'd say that's a fairly decent reason to be very very wary.
Except everything about that patient coming to an American hospital is going to be 100% quarantine and biohazard suits and clean rooms and rigorous protocol and safety measures which quite frankly is a lot better than a Nigerian hotel room.
yeah, until the exact same thing that happens over there happens here. Some moron decides they don't want everyone to know they might have ebola, pretends they can beat it by staying hydrated, and ends up giving it to however many people until we have west africa right here!
Look on the bright side: single-payer might be just about to get a hell of a lot more popular
So they're bringing a physician who's been infected to our local hospital's new biocontainment unit, and every story about it is spawning some choice awfulness in the comments.
I swear every time someone tries to bring facts into those discussions they're instantly shut down by screeching panic addicts. It's simultaneously beautiful and horrific to watch.
I'm pretty much on their side at this point. I mean when you have diplomats and doctors actively and stupidly infecting 'X' people because 'fuck quarantine', I'd say that's a fairly decent reason to be very very wary.
Except everything about that patient coming to an American hospital is going to be 100% quarantine and biohazard suits and clean rooms and rigorous protocol and safety measures which quite frankly is a lot better than a Nigerian hotel room.
yeah, until the exact same thing that happens over there happens here. Some moron decides they don't want everyone to know they might have ebola, pretends they can beat it by staying hydrated, and ends up giving it to however many people until we have west africa right here!
Look on the bright side: single-payer might be just about to get a hell of a lot more popular
It's more difficult to just pay to skip to the front of the line and get the best possible treatment under single payer. Since the people who can just pay for the best possible treatment are the big political donors, I don't think that it'll make it any more popular. Plus, the usual fear-mongering about waiting lists and needing to wait six months for treatment for routine problems will be on full display, as no one wants to be sitting in the emergency room for months with Ebola, waiting for a socialist doctor to finish her eight week union guaranteed vacation before she'll even start triage.
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
The scary bit in all of this, is that people ALREADY show up to the ER and flat out lie about what their symptoms are or how things happened. They already do this with things that we can absolutely treat and aren't that huge a rarity. I'm not even talking about the hundreds of visits to ER's a year where someone "accidentally sat on a piece of lubed up fruit", because that's embarrassing, I can see why you'd not want to mention that one. I'm talking about the people who show up with possible TB and then refuse to admit they were recently in the fucking Philippines because though we can treat it, it would mean they'd have to hang out for a day or so to rule it out.
Ebola itself is only a thing in the first world countries because people make it a thing when they don't seek treatment, it wouldn't be terrifying in the slightest if you could count on your fellow humans to not be selfish about something. I can certainly understand why you wouldn't want to go to a "containment camp" and wait to die. Going to a modern hospital to get IV fluids and improve your chances, while possibly preventing people you love from getting the same illness? That sounds like a good idea.
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Captain Marcusnow arrives the hour of actionRegistered Userregular
The really dangerous infection when it comes to Ebola is fear.
Like that asshole surgeon and the diplomat. Panic will cause more destruction if Ebola gets to America than Ebola will.
The movie Contagion (although inaccurate) is pretty good at showing what will happen when people panic.
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As far as how fast it takes to create a vaccine (long!) and how fast it takes to kick in. They're not magic, and your immune system takes a few days to ramp up. But how the disease mutated and was spread globally was excellent and very true-to-life.
The scary bit in all of this, is that people ALREADY show up to the ER and flat out lie about what their symptoms are or how things happened. They already do this with things that we can absolutely treat and aren't that huge a rarity. I'm not even talking about the hundreds of visits to ER's a year where someone "accidentally sat on a piece of lubed up fruit", because that's embarrassing, I can see why you'd not want to mention that one. I'm talking about the people who show up with possible TB and then refuse to admit they were recently in the fucking Philippines because though we can treat it, it would mean they'd have to hang out for a day or so to rule it out.
Ebola itself is only a thing in the first world countries because people make it a thing when they don't seek treatment, it wouldn't be terrifying in the slightest if you could count on your fellow humans to not be selfish about something. I can certainly understand why you wouldn't want to go to a "containment camp" and wait to die. Going to a modern hospital to get IV fluids and improve your chances, while possibly preventing people you love from getting the same illness? That sounds like a good idea.
I'd say a fair bit of that in the states can be blames on our awful employment laws. It's not that many of those people don't want to get treated, it's that they know if they call in sick and say "hey, I might have X, so the doc needs me to hang around for a day to see if that's the case," could likely result in them losing their job. Granted, some people are douches like my dad, "oh I'm sick, I'm still going to go to work because only pansies stay home sick."
So my main concern with an ebola case in the states, would be that it would spread farther than it should. Not because people are ignorant and doubt the existence of ebola, but because one of the poor bastards that caught it, has a shitty boss that will fire people who miss one day of work. So instead of seeing a doctor and getting it treated, while being quarantined. That person will instead show up at their shitty retail/office/restaurant job, up until they get sent to the hospital anyways, and get a bunch of people infected.
The really dangerous infection when it comes to Ebola is fear.
Like that asshole surgeon and the diplomat. Panic will cause more destruction if Ebola gets to America than Ebola will.
The movie Contagion (although inaccurate) is pretty good at showing what will happen when people panic.
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As far as how fast it takes to create a vaccine (long!) and how fast it takes to kick in. They're not magic, and your immune system takes a few days to ramp up. But how the disease mutated and was spread globally was excellent and very true-to-life.
Yea, all the timing was way compressed for the molecule mapping and vaccine stuff but it was otherwise fairly good.
Given the vectors and the behaviors that are causing it to spread I don't see what 'the rest of the world' can actually do to stop it. Okay that isn't 100% true, but do we even have that much napalm?
Send needed supplies to medical facilities in the three most affected countries, for starters. Seriously, a lot of these places don't have gloves. That's why nearly 10% of the cases/fatalities have been doctors and nurses, and why nurses have been going on strike in those hospitals. It's a disease that is spread through physical contact, and they have no way to shield themselves from the contagious fluids, even though it's very simple and cheap. Disposable needles, bleach to sterilize surfaces after someone throws up or sweats on something, face masks, clean water, and so on.
It's hard to get people to go to quarantine and keep them there if it's basically just a cell to dump people until they die, which is what is being done now basically. Also hard to have medical people treating people who are sick if the medical people are all dead.
This is the reason why the CDC and WHO and so forth are telling the surrounding countries not to shut their borders, by the way. It makes it really hard to bring in supplies and move personnel in and out to affected areas.
So my main concern with an ebola case in the states, would be that it would spread farther than it should. Not because people are ignorant and doubt the existence of ebola, but because one of the poor bastards that caught it, has a shitty boss that will fire people who miss one day of work. So instead of seeing a doctor and getting it treated, while being quarantined. That person will instead show up at their shitty retail/office/restaurant job, up until they get sent to the hospital anyways, and get a bunch of people infected.
This is a problem for the flu but not Ebola. Ebola is a hemorrhagic fever. You bleed profusely from every orifice until you die or get better, and by the time the bleeding starts you're in no shape to go anywhere, much less wait tables. Even if they miraculously did show up, the boss/fellow employees/everyone would take one look at the guy bleeding from his eyes and vomiting black blood and they'd call an ambulance right away.
No clearly the hypothetical Ebola outbreak in three US is an epidemic because of: our lack of single payer, or that fast food workers don't make $20 an hour, or student loan debt, or that we didn't institute cap and trade or whatever else everyone's pet cause is.
No clearly the hypothetical Ebola outbreak in three US is an epidemic because of: our lack of single payer, or that fast food workers don't make $20 an hour, or student loan debt, or that we didn't institute cap and trade or whatever else everyone's pet cause is.
Yes, those (aside from the ridiculously hyperbolic ones like cap and trade) are all things that make an epidemic / pandemic more difficult to treat and contain. There's a good reason that subsistence economies with shitty medical systems are more likely to be ravaged by disease.
It should be trivially obvious that better and more available medical care will lessen the impact of an epidemic / pandemic. It should also be obvious that people who are able and willing to stay home and rest are less likely to spread disease and will likely experience better outcomes. Places with better education systems (especially in science / biology and health education) are PROBABLY going to experience less panic. Etc.
Hell, if - since we ARE talking about a hypothetical outbreak here in America - there were an outbreak, treating Ebola is pretty straightforward and not particularly resource intensive. Hydrate, disinfect everything, wear gloves and face shields. You don't really even need to worry about shortages of medicine since there's no Tamiflu for Ebola.
As for Contagion...I agree that the timeline was very compressed. That said, if you did have a massive outbreak on that scale, the amount of resources that would pour into research and trials would greatly speed up development of a vaccine. Especially if the outbreak is something we're already relatively familiar with, like influenza.
No clearly the hypothetical Ebola outbreak in three US is an epidemic because of: our lack of single payer, or that fast food workers don't make $20 an hour, or student loan debt, or that we didn't institute cap and trade or whatever else everyone's pet cause is.
Yes, those (aside from the ridiculously hyperbolic ones like cap and trade) are all things that make an epidemic / pandemic more difficult to treat and contain. There's a good reason that subsistence economies with shitty medical systems are more likely to be ravaged by disease.
It should be trivially obvious that better and more available medical care will lessen the impact of an epidemic / pandemic. It should also be obvious that people who are able and willing to stay home and rest are less likely to spread disease and will likely experience better outcomes. Places with better education systems (especially in science / biology and health education) are PROBABLY going to experience less panic. Etc.
Hell, if - since we ARE talking about a hypothetical outbreak here in America - there were an outbreak, treating Ebola is pretty straightforward and not particularly resource intensive. Hydrate, disinfect everything, wear gloves and face shields. You don't really even need to worry about shortages of medicine since there's no Tamiflu for Ebola.
As for Contagion...I agree that the timeline was very compressed. That said, if you did have a massive outbreak on that scale, the amount of resources that would pour into research and trials would greatly speed up development of a vaccine. Especially if the outbreak is something we're already relatively familiar with, like influenza.
The lack of a comprehensive medical system in America is a major concern among public health researchers when it comes to pandemics. The system is already under strain from treating the routine health needs of the population and - between hospital closures, a lack of physicians, poor funding, supply chain issues and a huge number of uninsured citizens - there's real concern that our medical infrastructure is not up handling a nationwide emergency.
Systems already under severe stress do not do well when presented with a major crisis. Beyond the basic shortages and lack of infrastructure, you also have the fact that already disgruntled physicians/nurses will start looking out for themselves and their family in a crisis, since the type of esprit de corps necessary to get people to commit to risking their lives for others is lacking in an abusive environment.
That's why a modern nation should have a robust healthcare system with a lot of slack. More than one expert on the subject believes that the U.S. medical system would shatter if faced with a modern version of the 1918 flu pandemic.
The scary bit in all of this, is that people ALREADY show up to the ER and flat out lie about what their symptoms are or how things happened. They already do this with things that we can absolutely treat and aren't that huge a rarity. I'm not even talking about the hundreds of visits to ER's a year where someone "accidentally sat on a piece of lubed up fruit", because that's embarrassing, I can see why you'd not want to mention that one. I'm talking about the people who show up with possible TB and then refuse to admit they were recently in the fucking Philippines because though we can treat it, it would mean they'd have to hang out for a day or so to rule it out.
Ebola itself is only a thing in the first world countries because people make it a thing when they don't seek treatment, it wouldn't be terrifying in the slightest if you could count on your fellow humans to not be selfish about something. I can certainly understand why you wouldn't want to go to a "containment camp" and wait to die. Going to a modern hospital to get IV fluids and improve your chances, while possibly preventing people you love from getting the same illness? That sounds like a good idea.
I'd say a fair bit of that in the states can be blames on our awful employment laws. It's not that many of those people don't want to get treated, it's that they know if they call in sick and say "hey, I might have X, so the doc needs me to hang around for a day to see if that's the case," could likely result in them losing their job. Granted, some people are douches like my dad, "oh I'm sick, I'm still going to go to work because only pansies stay home sick."
So my main concern with an ebola case in the states, would be that it would spread farther than it should. Not because people are ignorant and doubt the existence of ebola, but because one of the poor bastards that caught it, has a shitty boss that will fire people who miss one day of work. So instead of seeing a doctor and getting it treated, while being quarantined. That person will instead show up at their shitty retail/office/restaurant job, up until they get sent to the hospital anyways, and get a bunch of people infected.
Employers could look at research showing that sick employees lower total productivity more than their lone absence by infecting additional employees. It's basically like letting someone walk in and give some people the flu. But instead of providing paid sick leave to help your sick employee recover and to keep your healthy employees healthy, most employers just refuse to provide any sort of benefits or support related to illness. We are not very good with prevention.
I'd like to hope that (as at least one good thing) the ebola stuff raises people's awareness about how terribly illnesses are handled by the societal structures in the US and how knowledgeable our medical practitioners are (even if overworked and frequently vilified for excessive costs).
The scary bit in all of this, is that people ALREADY show up to the ER and flat out lie about what their symptoms are or how things happened. They already do this with things that we can absolutely treat and aren't that huge a rarity. I'm not even talking about the hundreds of visits to ER's a year where someone "accidentally sat on a piece of lubed up fruit", because that's embarrassing, I can see why you'd not want to mention that one. I'm talking about the people who show up with possible TB and then refuse to admit they were recently in the fucking Philippines because though we can treat it, it would mean they'd have to hang out for a day or so to rule it out.
Ebola itself is only a thing in the first world countries because people make it a thing when they don't seek treatment, it wouldn't be terrifying in the slightest if you could count on your fellow humans to not be selfish about something. I can certainly understand why you wouldn't want to go to a "containment camp" and wait to die. Going to a modern hospital to get IV fluids and improve your chances, while possibly preventing people you love from getting the same illness? That sounds like a good idea.
I'd say a fair bit of that in the states can be blames on our awful employment laws. It's not that many of those people don't want to get treated, it's that they know if they call in sick and say "hey, I might have X, so the doc needs me to hang around for a day to see if that's the case," could likely result in them losing their job. Granted, some people are douches like my dad, "oh I'm sick, I'm still going to go to work because only pansies stay home sick."
So my main concern with an ebola case in the states, would be that it would spread farther than it should. Not because people are ignorant and doubt the existence of ebola, but because one of the poor bastards that caught it, has a shitty boss that will fire people who miss one day of work. So instead of seeing a doctor and getting it treated, while being quarantined. That person will instead show up at their shitty retail/office/restaurant job, up until they get sent to the hospital anyways, and get a bunch of people infected.
Employers could look at research showing that sick employees lower total productivity more than their lone absence by infecting additional employees. It's basically like letting someone walk in and give some people the flu. But instead of providing paid sick leave to help your sick employee recover and to keep your healthy employees healthy, most employers just refuse to provide any sort of benefits or support related to illness. We are not very good with prevention.
I'd like to hope that (as at least one good thing) the ebola stuff raises people's awareness about how terribly illnesses are handled by the societal structures in the US and how knowledgeable our medical practitioners are (even if overworked and frequently vilified for excessive costs).
From my experience, management in the U.S. focuses on how employees could take advantage of a policy. So, the question would never be framed as "Will letting this employee stay home and work improve productivity" and more as "If we let this employee stay home, she might pretend to be sick."
Fortunately, it looks like he almost certainly doesn't have Ebola, and fortunately the Australian healthcare system is excellent. But if you start thinking about it, if he does then that's somewhere on the order of a 1000 people we need to follow up on for possible symptoms.
We actually have a smallpox containment plan in the U.S.
It's "draw a big circle, that's the quaratine. Shoot anyone who tries to leave the quarantine, use the limited stock of vaccine on the areas all around the outside of the circle + rich/connected/influential people who are far away from the quarantine".
And yeah, the strategy is everyone inside the arbitrary designated quarantine zone is 100% fucked.
In Monrovia, taxis filled with entire families, of whom some members are thought to be infected with the Ebola virus, crisscross the city, searching for a treatment bed. There are none. As WHO staff in Liberia confirm, no free beds for Ebola treatment exist anywhere in the country.
According to a WHO staff member who has been in Liberia for the past several weeks, motorbike-taxis and regular taxis are a hot source of potential Ebola virus transmission, as these vehicles are not disinfected at all, much less before new passengers are taken on board.
So I've gotten a little more worried about the whole "could it become airborne" thing lately. Someone pointed out that this is probably the most people, in the most varied degrees of proximity, that the virus has ever been exposed to.
It did not take many transfers at all in the ferret experiments for new features to get added to improve transmissibility.
So I've gotten a little more worried about the whole "could it become airborne" thing lately. Someone pointed out that this is probably the most people, in the most varied degrees of proximity, that the virus has ever been exposed to.
It did not take many transfers at all in the ferret experiments for new features to get added to improve transmissibility.
If Ebola goes airborne and reaches Australia, I'm quitting my job, stocking my room with long-lasting food and water, and staying there until the situation improves. I am dead fucking serious right now. In fact I should probably start stocking up now since once the shit hits the fan everybody else is going to have the same idea, and it can't hurt to have a couple of weeks of emergency rations on hand.
Sadly, this wouldn't actually be a major change to how I live my life at the moment, aside from not going to work.
So I've gotten a little more worried about the whole "could it become airborne" thing lately. Someone pointed out that this is probably the most people, in the most varied degrees of proximity, that the virus has ever been exposed to.
It did not take many transfers at all in the ferret experiments for new features to get added to improve transmissibility.
From what I've read, the structure of the virus makes it extremely unlikely to mutate in a way that lets it become airborne. On the level of a human mutating a set of wings and going airborne level of unlikeliness.
So, not very likely as long as you're not Warren Worthington Jr.
Indeed. Evolving a drug resistance for example can be as simple as single point mutation in the right place, and is usually under intense positive selection pressure as soon as it appears in even the mildest form. You need to change a single molecular interaction.
Evolving a whole new transmission is so much more complex. You're talking a change to the entire structure of the viral particle to withstand a whole host of environmental factors.
I think a lot of people's fears of rapid viral evolution come from the fact that we mostly hear about flu pandemics. There's a reason flu causes these pandemics and that is that its mutation rate is one of the highest in the viral world. Plus flu has the whole multiple strains floating around multiple species all mixing together and occasionally having a genetic re-assortment orgy. In comparison to flu, ebola is pretty much entirely dead stable genetically.
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
There's two different ways that something can go airborne.
One is the way that you're all probably thinking of, like the flu - tiny virus particles that go floating off in the air and are so tiny that they pass right through flimsy masks and you need really expensive and elaborate respirators to keep clean. This requires a virus to infect the respiratory system so it can be breathed/sneezed/coughed out, and it needs to be small. As Ebola mostly attacks the circulatory system and mucus membranes, this is highly unlikely. There would be a massive number of mutations needed to both attack the airways and then be transmitted that way.
The second is for a virus to hitch a ride on particulate matter, like tiny droplets of water or aerosolized feces. It can be much larger, but it doesn't spread nearly as far because the droplets are heavy enough that they drop to the ground shortly, and it can be blocked with face masks. This is more of a possibility as Lassa fever (another hemorrhagic fever, which is also endemic in Liberia and kills around 5000 every year) is probably spread by aerosolized mouse fecal matter.
People online are talking about it going airborne transmission somehow and that being the "nightmare scenario." No, we're already in the nightmare scenario. This is what virologists actually worried about: Ebola getting to a large populated area with no health infrastructure and spreading out of control. But while other countries are needlessly fretting about the virus coming to their shores, Malaysia is actually doing something useful: donating 20 million rubber gloves. I've mentioned before that lack of incredibly basic medical equipment like gloves was hampering control efforts so this is a very, very good thing.
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
I can't even comprehend that, Maya. It's like something out of a horror movie.
Just takes one person to see something they don't quite understand. They tell someone who tells someone who tells someone until it becomes "They are trying to kill us." Hiding the bodies like that was because that tends to happen after killing someone and afterwards realizing it wasn't the right thing to do. Fleeing the village was a fight or flight reaction to the government coming to kill them for what they did, and fighting wasn't really an option.
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
To try to get a grip on Ebola (identify victims, bury the dead, keep people from moving around and infecting others at least for a bit), Sierra Leone started a three day lockdown, ordering everyone to stay indoors for that time. It's not working very well. Other articles have mentioned people openly defying it since Sierra Leone doesn't have the capacity to actually enforce the lockdown.
Meanwhile in Liberia now, with most hospitals full of Ebola patients, people are dying from lack of medical care for every other reason, like childbirth and malaria, when previously they would have been able to get some sort of treatment, or at least somewhere somewhat clean to drop the baby.
Also, you know how the media was reporting a 55% or so fatality rate? Some had noted that it's much lower than the usual case fatality rate for the Zaire strain (which is the one that can have upwards of 90% fatality rates.) Turns out that since the spread of infections has been so fast and everyone is overwhelmed, no one has been compiling data of how many people actually survive. They've just been dividing the known number of deaths currently with the known current number of infections, since information has been hard to come by. The rapid spread has been deflating the numbers. Some people have tried to extrapolate based on how many people are being treated in certain places and how many are released as having recovered, and the true fatality rate seems to be more along the lines of 75-85%.
And those are for the people who ARE getting treatment; again, it's probably 2-4 times worse than what we know of so the rates are probably even worse for people who can't get treatment, like those being turned away from overfull hospitals or ones way out in the sticks that don't have any nearby hospitals.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited September 2014
btw dudes it is likely that unless something changes in how this is being handled there are going to be really horrendously large numbers of cases pretty soon.
the response has been completely inadequate and it looks like the who predictions of exponential growth are thus far holding.
I can't even comprehend that, Maya. It's like something out of a horror movie.
To me that seems like a particularly good reason to let that part of the world rot with ebola without aid.
Leaving aside the "punish the many with agonising death for the actions of a few" factor, let's ponder how clever it would be to let a fantastically infectious and incurably deadly disease rage unchecked in this oh so very interconnected and internationally mobile world we live in.
Even if you could not give less of a shit about how many black africans die of Ebola, it's very strongly in your self interest to see this disease contained, cured and eradicated as quickly as possible.
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
BTW, those eight health workers were Guineans, not foreigner aid workers. A local minister there assembled people in his ministry to travel from village to village to spread awareness of Ebola and bring tanks of lightly-bleached water for hand-washing and sterilization. They were trying to help their own countrymen.
I can't even comprehend that, Maya. It's like something out of a horror movie.
To me that seems like a particularly good reason to let that part of the world rot with ebola without aid.
Leaving aside the "punish the many with agonising death for the actions of a few" factor, let's ponder how clever it would be to let a fantastically infectious and incurably deadly disease rage unchecked in this oh so very interconnected and internationally mobile world we live in.
Even if you could not give less of a shit about how many black africans die of Ebola, it's very strongly in your self interest to see this disease contained, cured and eradicated as quickly as possible.
It's not -that- infectious, it's not like the flu. And how would it get out if you sealed the borders and blocked all air traffic? Let it burn itself out?
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TraceGNU Terry Pratchett; GNU Gus; GNU Carrie Fisher; GNU Adam WeRegistered Userregular
I can't even comprehend that, Maya. It's like something out of a horror movie.
To me that seems like a particularly good reason to let that part of the world rot with ebola without aid.
Leaving aside the "punish the many with agonising death for the actions of a few" factor, let's ponder how clever it would be to let a fantastically infectious and incurably deadly disease rage unchecked in this oh so very interconnected and internationally mobile world we live in.
Even if you could not give less of a shit about how many black africans die of Ebola, it's very strongly in your self interest to see this disease contained, cured and eradicated as quickly as possible.
It's not -that- infectious, it's not like the flu. And how would it get out if you sealed the borders and blocked all air traffic? Let it burn itself out?
Really? I guess this Ebola outbreak isn't really happening.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
I can't even comprehend that, Maya. It's like something out of a horror movie.
To me that seems like a particularly good reason to let that part of the world rot with ebola without aid.
Leaving aside the "punish the many with agonising death for the actions of a few" factor, let's ponder how clever it would be to let a fantastically infectious and incurably deadly disease rage unchecked in this oh so very interconnected and internationally mobile world we live in.
Even if you could not give less of a shit about how many black africans die of Ebola, it's very strongly in your self interest to see this disease contained, cured and eradicated as quickly as possible.
It's not -that- infectious, it's not like the flu. And how would it get out if you sealed the borders and blocked all air traffic? Let it burn itself out?
Really? I guess this Ebola outbreak isn't really happening.
What he means is that the vectors for infection are not aerosol, so prevention in a country with actually medical infrastructure is not especially difficult.
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Look on the bright side: single-payer might be just about to get a hell of a lot more popular
It's more difficult to just pay to skip to the front of the line and get the best possible treatment under single payer. Since the people who can just pay for the best possible treatment are the big political donors, I don't think that it'll make it any more popular. Plus, the usual fear-mongering about waiting lists and needing to wait six months for treatment for routine problems will be on full display, as no one wants to be sitting in the emergency room for months with Ebola, waiting for a socialist doctor to finish her eight week union guaranteed vacation before she'll even start triage.
Ebola itself is only a thing in the first world countries because people make it a thing when they don't seek treatment, it wouldn't be terrifying in the slightest if you could count on your fellow humans to not be selfish about something. I can certainly understand why you wouldn't want to go to a "containment camp" and wait to die. Going to a modern hospital to get IV fluids and improve your chances, while possibly preventing people you love from getting the same illness? That sounds like a good idea.
As far as how fast it takes to create a vaccine (long!) and how fast it takes to kick in. They're not magic, and your immune system takes a few days to ramp up. But how the disease mutated and was spread globally was excellent and very true-to-life.
I'd say a fair bit of that in the states can be blames on our awful employment laws. It's not that many of those people don't want to get treated, it's that they know if they call in sick and say "hey, I might have X, so the doc needs me to hang around for a day to see if that's the case," could likely result in them losing their job. Granted, some people are douches like my dad, "oh I'm sick, I'm still going to go to work because only pansies stay home sick."
So my main concern with an ebola case in the states, would be that it would spread farther than it should. Not because people are ignorant and doubt the existence of ebola, but because one of the poor bastards that caught it, has a shitty boss that will fire people who miss one day of work. So instead of seeing a doctor and getting it treated, while being quarantined. That person will instead show up at their shitty retail/office/restaurant job, up until they get sent to the hospital anyways, and get a bunch of people infected.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Yea, all the timing was way compressed for the molecule mapping and vaccine stuff but it was otherwise fairly good.
Send needed supplies to medical facilities in the three most affected countries, for starters. Seriously, a lot of these places don't have gloves. That's why nearly 10% of the cases/fatalities have been doctors and nurses, and why nurses have been going on strike in those hospitals. It's a disease that is spread through physical contact, and they have no way to shield themselves from the contagious fluids, even though it's very simple and cheap. Disposable needles, bleach to sterilize surfaces after someone throws up or sweats on something, face masks, clean water, and so on.
It's hard to get people to go to quarantine and keep them there if it's basically just a cell to dump people until they die, which is what is being done now basically. Also hard to have medical people treating people who are sick if the medical people are all dead.
This is the reason why the CDC and WHO and so forth are telling the surrounding countries not to shut their borders, by the way. It makes it really hard to bring in supplies and move personnel in and out to affected areas.
"amongst the survivors"
This is a problem for the flu but not Ebola. Ebola is a hemorrhagic fever. You bleed profusely from every orifice until you die or get better, and by the time the bleeding starts you're in no shape to go anywhere, much less wait tables. Even if they miraculously did show up, the boss/fellow employees/everyone would take one look at the guy bleeding from his eyes and vomiting black blood and they'd call an ambulance right away.
Yes, those (aside from the ridiculously hyperbolic ones like cap and trade) are all things that make an epidemic / pandemic more difficult to treat and contain. There's a good reason that subsistence economies with shitty medical systems are more likely to be ravaged by disease.
It should be trivially obvious that better and more available medical care will lessen the impact of an epidemic / pandemic. It should also be obvious that people who are able and willing to stay home and rest are less likely to spread disease and will likely experience better outcomes. Places with better education systems (especially in science / biology and health education) are PROBABLY going to experience less panic. Etc.
Hell, if - since we ARE talking about a hypothetical outbreak here in America - there were an outbreak, treating Ebola is pretty straightforward and not particularly resource intensive. Hydrate, disinfect everything, wear gloves and face shields. You don't really even need to worry about shortages of medicine since there's no Tamiflu for Ebola.
As for Contagion...I agree that the timeline was very compressed. That said, if you did have a massive outbreak on that scale, the amount of resources that would pour into research and trials would greatly speed up development of a vaccine. Especially if the outbreak is something we're already relatively familiar with, like influenza.
The lack of a comprehensive medical system in America is a major concern among public health researchers when it comes to pandemics. The system is already under strain from treating the routine health needs of the population and - between hospital closures, a lack of physicians, poor funding, supply chain issues and a huge number of uninsured citizens - there's real concern that our medical infrastructure is not up handling a nationwide emergency.
Systems already under severe stress do not do well when presented with a major crisis. Beyond the basic shortages and lack of infrastructure, you also have the fact that already disgruntled physicians/nurses will start looking out for themselves and their family in a crisis, since the type of esprit de corps necessary to get people to commit to risking their lives for others is lacking in an abusive environment.
That's why a modern nation should have a robust healthcare system with a lot of slack. More than one expert on the subject believes that the U.S. medical system would shatter if faced with a modern version of the 1918 flu pandemic.
Employers could look at research showing that sick employees lower total productivity more than their lone absence by infecting additional employees. It's basically like letting someone walk in and give some people the flu. But instead of providing paid sick leave to help your sick employee recover and to keep your healthy employees healthy, most employers just refuse to provide any sort of benefits or support related to illness. We are not very good with prevention.
I'd like to hope that (as at least one good thing) the ebola stuff raises people's awareness about how terribly illnesses are handled by the societal structures in the US and how knowledgeable our medical practitioners are (even if overworked and frequently vilified for excessive costs).
From my experience, management in the U.S. focuses on how employees could take advantage of a policy. So, the question would never be framed as "Will letting this employee stay home and work improve productivity" and more as "If we let this employee stay home, she might pretend to be sick."
Always keep in mind that modern U.S. management philosophy had its roots in getting more work out of slaves. A lot of other "Why do they do things like that?" questions flow from there.
Fortunately, it looks like he almost certainly doesn't have Ebola, and fortunately the Australian healthcare system is excellent. But if you start thinking about it, if he does then that's somewhere on the order of a 1000 people we need to follow up on for possible symptoms.
there's no profit in a system that has slack
It's "draw a big circle, that's the quaratine. Shoot anyone who tries to leave the quarantine, use the limited stock of vaccine on the areas all around the outside of the circle + rich/connected/influential people who are far away from the quarantine".
And yeah, the strategy is everyone inside the arbitrary designated quarantine zone is 100% fucked.
I can remember doing an inspection of all the things WRONG with our local hospital as part of a lawsuit.
I have pictures taken from the exterior of the hospital into the 'clean room' via a gap around a pipe through the wall.
That hospital failed on so many levels it was appaling.
sadly, it's the one I have to take my kids to as it's the only one around.
also, my coworker got a massive infection from a scrape obtained from looking into a bunch of ceiling tiles.
I'd wager there are a LOT of hospitals like mine all across the country.
It did not take many transfers at all in the ferret experiments for new features to get added to improve transmissibility.
If Ebola goes airborne and reaches Australia, I'm quitting my job, stocking my room with long-lasting food and water, and staying there until the situation improves. I am dead fucking serious right now. In fact I should probably start stocking up now since once the shit hits the fan everybody else is going to have the same idea, and it can't hurt to have a couple of weeks of emergency rations on hand.
Sadly, this wouldn't actually be a major change to how I live my life at the moment, aside from not going to work.
From what I've read, the structure of the virus makes it extremely unlikely to mutate in a way that lets it become airborne. On the level of a human mutating a set of wings and going airborne level of unlikeliness.
So, not very likely as long as you're not Warren Worthington Jr.
Evolving a whole new transmission is so much more complex. You're talking a change to the entire structure of the viral particle to withstand a whole host of environmental factors.
I think a lot of people's fears of rapid viral evolution come from the fact that we mostly hear about flu pandemics. There's a reason flu causes these pandemics and that is that its mutation rate is one of the highest in the viral world. Plus flu has the whole multiple strains floating around multiple species all mixing together and occasionally having a genetic re-assortment orgy. In comparison to flu, ebola is pretty much entirely dead stable genetically.
One is the way that you're all probably thinking of, like the flu - tiny virus particles that go floating off in the air and are so tiny that they pass right through flimsy masks and you need really expensive and elaborate respirators to keep clean. This requires a virus to infect the respiratory system so it can be breathed/sneezed/coughed out, and it needs to be small. As Ebola mostly attacks the circulatory system and mucus membranes, this is highly unlikely. There would be a massive number of mutations needed to both attack the airways and then be transmitted that way.
The second is for a virus to hitch a ride on particulate matter, like tiny droplets of water or aerosolized feces. It can be much larger, but it doesn't spread nearly as far because the droplets are heavy enough that they drop to the ground shortly, and it can be blocked with face masks. This is more of a possibility as Lassa fever (another hemorrhagic fever, which is also endemic in Liberia and kills around 5000 every year) is probably spread by aerosolized mouse fecal matter.
People online are talking about it going airborne transmission somehow and that being the "nightmare scenario." No, we're already in the nightmare scenario. This is what virologists actually worried about: Ebola getting to a large populated area with no health infrastructure and spreading out of control. But while other countries are needlessly fretting about the virus coming to their shores, Malaysia is actually doing something useful: donating 20 million rubber gloves. I've mentioned before that lack of incredibly basic medical equipment like gloves was hampering control efforts so this is a very, very good thing.
Or, you know, out of our own history - consider why the black community in the US still distrusts the medical profession.
Just takes one person to see something they don't quite understand. They tell someone who tells someone who tells someone until it becomes "They are trying to kill us." Hiding the bodies like that was because that tends to happen after killing someone and afterwards realizing it wasn't the right thing to do. Fleeing the village was a fight or flight reaction to the government coming to kill them for what they did, and fighting wasn't really an option.
Meanwhile in Liberia now, with most hospitals full of Ebola patients, people are dying from lack of medical care for every other reason, like childbirth and malaria, when previously they would have been able to get some sort of treatment, or at least somewhere somewhat clean to drop the baby.
Also, you know how the media was reporting a 55% or so fatality rate? Some had noted that it's much lower than the usual case fatality rate for the Zaire strain (which is the one that can have upwards of 90% fatality rates.) Turns out that since the spread of infections has been so fast and everyone is overwhelmed, no one has been compiling data of how many people actually survive. They've just been dividing the known number of deaths currently with the known current number of infections, since information has been hard to come by. The rapid spread has been deflating the numbers. Some people have tried to extrapolate based on how many people are being treated in certain places and how many are released as having recovered, and the true fatality rate seems to be more along the lines of 75-85%.
And those are for the people who ARE getting treatment; again, it's probably 2-4 times worse than what we know of so the rates are probably even worse for people who can't get treatment, like those being turned away from overfull hospitals or ones way out in the sticks that don't have any nearby hospitals.
the response has been completely inadequate and it looks like the who predictions of exponential growth are thus far holding.
and another
https://docs.unocha.org/sites/dms/CAP/Ebola_outbreak_Sep_2014.pdf
not good
who response roadmap here: http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/135029/1/roadmapupdate26sept14_eng.pdf?ua=1
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)61611-1/fulltext
To me that seems like a particularly good reason to let that part of the world rot with ebola without aid.
With guns
Leaving aside the "punish the many with agonising death for the actions of a few" factor, let's ponder how clever it would be to let a fantastically infectious and incurably deadly disease rage unchecked in this oh so very interconnected and internationally mobile world we live in.
Even if you could not give less of a shit about how many black africans die of Ebola, it's very strongly in your self interest to see this disease contained, cured and eradicated as quickly as possible.
That three day lockdown in Sierra Leone? They declared it to be a huge success, and then placed one third of its population under quarantine and unable to leave their area.
It's not -that- infectious, it's not like the flu. And how would it get out if you sealed the borders and blocked all air traffic? Let it burn itself out?
Really? I guess this Ebola outbreak isn't really happening.
What he means is that the vectors for infection are not aerosol, so prevention in a country with actually medical infrastructure is not especially difficult.