"The strongest argument I believe against it is, when people are coming into the country ... you can track them. If you say, 'Nobody comes from Sierra Leone, Liberia or Guinea,' there are so many other ways to get into the country. You can go to one of the other countries and get back in," [And then you don't have the opportunity to track them for symptoms.]Fauci added that there is not a big influx of people. Of the roughly 36,000 people who tried to leave those three countries, none was found to have the virus.
But of course when you have politicians looking for a few more votes 3 weeks before tight elections, this is just too good an opportunity to exploit people's fear. Since President Obama is following the advice of experts, and since he can do no right, then the experts must be wrong. And doing something always is more arousing than showing proper restraint.
And besides, when did facts matter to Republicans anyway?
I won't abet their perfidy by even listing those who are doing this, but it includes presidential hopefuls; some of them are just plain ignorant and proud of it, others are knowledgeable but unscrupulous enough to endager a nation for the short-term goal of re-election.
Really, how big a crisis is it in this country? We got off to a bad start, and the worst case scenario is that we would not learn from those early mistakes. The distance between containment and out of control is pretty narrow and rests on near perfection in executing the protocols. But we are learning from those mistakes and learning rapidly.
To put it in perspective: In the United States alone, deaths from flu and its complications are about 36,000 per year. We've had one death so far from Ebola. Worldwide, the estimate for flu deaths is between 250,000 and 500,000. So far the deaths from Ebola are between 4,000 and 4,500.
In addition, there is a vaccine for flu that you can get at your local pharmacy. You don't even have to go to your doctor to get a prescription. Medicare pays for seniors. Yet millions pass it up.
The complacency problem lies in familiarity vs fear of the unknown and the uncontrollable. Almost everyone has had the flu. Despite the statistics, because mild flu is so ubiquitous, almost everyone we know recovers from it. "Flu" does not strike terror in our hearts. Ebola -- with no vaccine, no known cure, and a high death rate even among healthy health care workers -- terrifies us.
In this time of fear, we should listen to the experts. Fauci is reassuring:
"There aren’t absolutes. Nothing is completely risk-free. . . . But the relative risk of things, people need to understand, is very, very small."As FDR famously said: It's the fear itself that we need to fear. That is, fear that leads us to do something irrational that only makes things worse.
Ralph
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