http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2014/10/15/ebola-patient-traveled-da...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fever
> characterized by an elevation of body temperature above the normal range of 36.5–37.5 °C (97.7–99.5 °F)
Also note even the professional WelchAllyn units are not 100% accurate, they're rated for 0.2 F plus or minus (I bought one not long ago after my old el-cheapo BD one died and Amazon reviews revealed today's el-cheapo ones are by and large worthless. Heck, 3M even created a new consumer brand, no doubt to avoid brand damage to BD).
It seems to me that if we're dealing with an unusually high-risk situation, it's better to err on the side of caution, no?
If the threshold was set too low, then the screening process would have too many false positives and potentially overburden it beyond being effective at all.
Now, the chances that anyone else on the same flight got infected is very very low, close to zero. That's even more true for the people who took other flights on the same plane, even the people who were sitting in the same seat that she sat in - though it's non-zero, as I doubt the airline disinfects the armrests and fold-down trays after every single flight. But just doing the contact tracking and being prepared to field telephone and email inquiries from all the other people who traveled on that plane with and after the nurse did is going to consume a bunch of CDC resources that could be better spent elsewhere.
Meanwhile, it seems that staff at the hospital were not wearing adequate protective gear for the first 2 days after Duncan was admitted until they got a positive blood test for Ebola: http://thescoopblog.dallasnews.com/2014/10/presbyterian-work...
False positives are bad but IMHO they're a lot cheaper than false negatives. When dealing with the limited subset of people who had contact with known Ebola carrier at the Texas hospital (a total of 76 medical personnel AFAIK), the slight economic cost of limiting travel and monitoring all of them for a few weeks seems low compared to the new situation.
If half a dozen people are kept off of every plane and quarantined, that's thousand of people a day. That's an overburdened health care staff. I have more sympathy for the problem.
I'm talking about a nurse who already knew she had spent days treating a patient who died from Ebola and who made several telephone calls to the CDC advising them that she felt feverish, who at a hospital that had already screwed up badly when that patient first presented, and whose administrators changed their story about this multiple times.
How you manage to ignore these additional risk factors and conclude that I was talking about screen all fliers is just beyond me. I believe I made the context abundantly clear: When dealing with the limited subset of people who had contact with known Ebola carrier at the Texas hospital (a total of 76 medical personnel AFAIK), the slight economic cost of limiting travel and monitoring all of them for a few weeks seems low compared to the new situation.
I believe it to be a good sign for the republic that the government has not resorted to do so.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/16/us/ebola-outbreak-texas.ht...
Check out the prefatory language of IETF RFCs, they generally give you a run down of these sorts of words.
Would it have been wise to quarantine her and keep her from traveling? in hindsight definitely.
Is it justifiable to restrict one's individual freedom on such a weak basis as "she's not feeling well, but is below the temperature threshold established by experts"? Here you can IMHO lean either way. If you are more utilitarian, you might argue for it. If you are more about individual rights, you might argue against it.
There, now your question is factually complete.
Perhaps the cost of allowing a lot of personal discretion from the CDC workers who make these decisions would be even higher than either.
If the threshold was set too low, then the screening process would have too many false positives and potentially overburden it beyond being effective at all.