The fact this is going to spread worldwide is inevitable. I honestly think we need to prevent people from this area of the world from coming to the US until they get this under control, this is simply unacceptable from a global standpoint.
There is absolutely no need for fear mongering and international travel restrictions, border checks and short quarantine for people coming from affected countries is suficient.
I’m guessing you’re in the US? What about the rest of us?
Similarly, no matter how free a country may be, there are rules about quarantines. You can be involuntarily subjected to one, and that's that. Your Constitutional rights or whatever your country may have are gone for the duration.
This goes below politics and below the blustery winds of the day all the way down to one of the foundational principles of society, which is, you won't have a forum to argue about how open borders should be in your society if you don't have a society at all because it got sick and died. Despite superficial similarities, this isn't about immigration debates or open borders or xenophobia or any of those hot-button issues. This is just, can you take basic, "lizard-hindbrain of society" actions to protect yourself or not?
I don't know that this particular outbreak is there or not, but it's only a matter of time before some outbreak of something is.
So the answer is, everyone should prevent people from potentially affected areas from coming in to the country for the duration of the outbreak. If you fail at this task, no amount of rhetoric, no amount of voting, and no amount of mocking your political opponents with various epithets about how phobic they are will do so much as save a single life from the resulting outbreak, because those are all category errors. Epidemics are not political matters. They are way further down the societal Maslow hierarchy than that.
Why then are you entirely focused on a political solution to a non-political matter? Closing borders is a political solution.
I disagree because your situation disrespects the progress that technical solutions have made over thousands of years of human progress. As medicine, hygiene and diagnostic tests improve, the probability of the dramatic epidemic event you propose falls closer to zero.
We detect and quarantine individuals who are at high risk of being infected, without shutting down borders worldwide. We use better hygiene and sanitation to reduce the transmission of disease. We can educate the public when a disease is a risk and people can take measures to reduce the likelihood of transmission. Researchers can find cures and effective treatments to reduce the threat even if the disease spreads.
For all your talk of reality and rationality, you don't mention any actual technical solutions in your grandstanding that this isn't about politics, instead contradicting yourself by basically focusing on a single political solution.
Secondly, as I sort of alluded to in my mention of quarantine, it's not about "borders". National borders are a relatively convenient cutting point in our world, but anything can be quarantined; a house, a state, Manhattan, a particular valley, a cross-country region, an airport, a hospital, whatever it takes. It's not about politics. It's not about any of the characteristics of the people on either side of the quarantine boundary beyond "are they contagious or not". It's about whether you can take the necessary steps to stop the spread of a pandemic or not.
I'll say it again, if you're sitting there standing on your rights and technology when something comes tearing through, then if nothing else you're going to filter out of the population all the people who are willing to trust technology and insist on free travel regardless, both because of changing attitudes and because of who ends up trusting in the assurances that everything's fine and doesn't take adequate steps themselves. If you value the believe in free travel, and you want a society to have an effective belief in free travel, then you must paradoxically be willing to handle cases like this very carefully, because if you stand on a 100% dogmatic "I don't care what diseases they have, free travel is literally more important than everyone's lives" stance you will create a society that does not value free travel at all once a highly-preventable epidemic sweeps through.
Did we read the same article? This article is about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a nation which does not have closed borders with the rest of the world, and Ebola has not spread beyond it's borders. The DRC does not have adequate medical infrastructure, sanitation or education and therefore the outbreak is occurring there.
Europe and the United States do have effective technology, medicine and disease control, so there is almost no risk of a widespread Ebola outbreak here.
> once a highly-preventable epidemic sweeps through.
Until you present a pathogen with this quality that cannot be controlled in the western world this is science fiction. You might as well argue that xenophobia and authoritarianism will prevail once sentient androids revolt. Until you have evidence the threat actually exists you're arguing based on ideology.
What’s that to say of the people that are in the midst of it? Harder to tell but prevailing policy sure indicates that countries are self-interested first and foremost.
Well right or wrong anyone in the first world is probabbly doesn't need to worry about ebola generally.
Still I get your point about just mentioning one country.
I suspect every first world country could handle an outbreak on their own and eliminate the disease in their own country in short order.
Basic healthcare practices that any hospital could handle are enough to deal with ebola.
We see it spread in places where there isn't basic healthcare and chaos that limits the ability for health workers to deal with it.
But who knows, maybe ebola could solve our anti vax issue for a few more decades.
That said, any mechanism for checking travel will undoubtedly turn corrupt. So it comes with that cost.
Civil rights are all well and good. But 'everybody dies of Ebola' might take precedence.