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Comment by olliej | Hacker News Reader

It’s a good thing that CDC employees are taking vacation time to go there and monitor the situation with no support from, well, the CDC.

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Are the disease control agencies of every other nation expected to physically monitor every such outbreak?

Most do actually because it’s useful to know what the risk to your own country is.

Specifically if we don’t think the effected country actually has the resources to do so. The alternative is wide spread contagion - take swine flu and bird flu, both started in China, and yet the lack of any monitoring allowed them to spread around the world before being contained. In that case the outbreak was deliberately not disclosed, but choosing not to disclose and not having resources to disclose have the same effect for /other/ countries, including your own.

Things like where a disease has spread is important to work out the risk of it reaching your own country.

You do know that most of what the cdc does is monitor right? It’s not actively going out to spend Your Tax Dollars treating patients - that’s something that the US doesn’t even do in America.

Alternatively we could choose to not track outbreaks and just hope that Ebola knows we’ll deport it if it comes here. (That works right?)

What is the benefit of physical presence in an area where there is an outbreak of a highly contagious disease? How will CDC employees "monitor" citizens of other countries? Please explain the mechanism by which this is supposed to work.

I do not see any evidence that Swine Flu started in China nor that ineffective monitoring is what led to its spread.[0][1] How would a problem like China fudging their numbers have been ameliorated by the presence of CDC employees? Why would China have allowed them in? Even if they did, would they have allowed them to work? If we can't trust foreign partners, we simply can't trust them and I fail to see any case where the problem of unreliable foreign partners can be fixed by the physical presence of CDC employees.

>spend Your Tax Dollars treating patients - that’s something that the US doesn’t even do in America.

Medicare and Medicaid alone accounted for $1.237 trillion of My Tax Dollar spending in 2016, which accounted for 37% of National Healthcare Expenditures.[2] That same year, ACA tax credits accounted for another $100 billion[3], the VA $166.9 billion[4], and TriCare (healthcare for milfare recipients) is usually another $50 billion. This notion that spending on healthcare is something the government "doesn't even do in America" is one of biggest and strangest (because of the ease with which it is refuted) whoppers regularly promulgated by leftist propagandists.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic_timeline

[2]: https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/sta...

[3]: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/53094

[4]: https://www.va.gov/budget/docs/summary/fy2019VAsBudgetFastFa...

It seems to me that having boots on the ground would allow you to talk to healthcare providers, morticians, community members...do a kind of internal reporting where you asses risks and make recommendations to anyone with the power to help contain, whether that is educating community, suggesting policing actions to local govt, or lobbying for the appropriate kind of external mediation (whether that’s vaccines, clean water, quarantine, etc, depending on the situation on the ground)

Edit: ...gathering samples, studying samples (shipping is not always trivial)...basically anything where you don’t really trust the local response for whatever combination of reasons, and you want to prevent or at least be ready in case there’s a global outbreak

The Bush Doctrine ("We fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here"), while bad for foreign policy, works quite well for infectious diseases.

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