The doctor should have known better than to go to a bowling alley soon after he returned. Whether or not he was contagious now they have to perform contact tracing and disinfect the place.
Was the bowling alley public subway trip really a must-do thing, for someone who had just directly worked with ebola patients? Could this kind of thinking not be part of the training for this kind of work, I wonder?
In my experience with experts I'd say especially someone who "knows better" can end up thinking that the bad thing can't happen to them right up until they, in a fit of being human, have an oops and it does.
Like enforced isolation of some kind? The thing that people have been asking for since the beginning, but is a bad idea for some reason that nobody can explain?
Also, in this case and many like it, imprisoning this man would have been much more expensive than simply testing him for the disease.
There you go; one reason it's a bad idea to imprison someone you think might be carrying ebola is that you can just test their blood and know for sure if they are. Seems a lot cheaper and better all round than imprisoning people.
The point here is that it's not clear that there's a reason to enforce a quarantine- yet. But if it becomes clear, then we need to have the balls to do it.
Are they free to leave whenever they wish? No? Sure sounds like imprisonment. Maybe it's for the best, but that doesn't mean it's not imprisonment. It's on the same moral spectrum as conscription and forced labour; the removal of fundamental rights from an individual for the betterment of a great many other people. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but it should be recognised that under the social system the country in question (USA) subscribes to, it's a fundamentally evil act.
While not illegal there should be comprehensive legal safeguards around it. And, if it's not illegal, what are the laws that regulate quarantine in the US?
http://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/index.html
The sub pages are lengthy and cite specific laws and so on.
Skimming, CDC has broad authority to detain travelers and states and local health departments usually have the power to enforce a quarantine (with violation of the quarantine being a misdemeanor).
Even the NY Times got it right this time: "People infected with Ebola cannot spread the disease until they begin to display symptoms, and it cannot be spread through the air."
Prior to this outbreak, this Ziare strain of Ebolavirus, now formally known as "Ebola virus", has never infected more than 318 people at a time, and not a whole lot more than a thousand total: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ebola_outbreaks#List_o...
I guarantee that at least one of the things the usual suspects like the CDC "know" about its transmission is wrong. Consequentially wrong? Well, we'll see.
As for this case, he was not feeling well (also described as "sluggish") for a couple of days before his self-monitored temperature spiked. Which is prompting the usual suspects to say that that wasn't a "symptom" ... which is open to question.
Meanwhile, the transmissions in Dallas have all been in keeping with the things the usual suspects were saying (health care workers did become infected there, but they are known to be at higher risk, PPE is known not to be 100% safe, the hospital did not have great PPE procedures in place).
As for Dallas, the plural of anecdote is not data. We just don't know yet; for example, in 1st World conditions where IV saline etc. are standard, the death rate may be well below the 70% currently estimated in West Africa. Although your points about the Dallas Ebola Magnet Hospital of Excellence's, are correct: while following the then current CDC "protocols" (scare quotes since the CDC and others invested so much into their sanctity vs. health care workers following them), were inadequate, e.g. no neck coverage.
Heck, look at the standard Bellevue Hospital PPE picture that's been floating around for many days, e.g. http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/bellevue-hospit... Based on what we suspect the person on the right would stand a serious chance of getting Ebola, and that's no longer the protocol.
Or look at this gem from the U.K. press: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2805930/Should-Offic...
You don't suppose there's some environmental, population density, etc. differences that might make NYC's experience different than Dallas'?
That doesn't mean chickens need to start running at axes the second a known case is identified and isolated.
Which is being advocated by precisely who?
My major theme here is that people, and most especially "authorities" should not be lying, e.g. not making absolute statements about things which aren't. So fat that that has resulted in a constantly changing the party line as preceding versions have turned out to be lies. But there's worse, in the most brazen example I know of, http://cnsnews.com/news/article/brittany-m-hughes/cdc-you-ca... contradicting yourself in consecutive sentences.
You want "panic"? Convince the American people the authorities responsible for keeping us from getting an epidemic of Biblical proportions are systematically, even routinely lying to us. We're well along the road to that.
He wasn't very clear there. But the CDC statements have been reasonably consistent and clear, especially in the face of the ridiculous questions they get from reporters. A softer reading is that transmission from an asymptomatic person who is later found to be infected is not believed to be possible at the time they are asymptomatic. Health workers with exposure should still, out of an abundance of cation, avoid contact with large groups of hard to trace people.
My main takeaways were (starting 25 minutes in): - There's a lot we don't know, especially about the current strain
- He's heard of patients that did not have a fever through the entire infection
- There have been incidents/experiments where we do not understand how ebola, this strain in particular, passed between animals
Accounts of how he was found are a bit odd. In some articles the fire department was sent to retrieve him. According to another article, a tenant in his building claims police broke down the door to get into his apartment.
I wonder how feasible this is. Its not just the bowling alley, using public rest rooms, subway, or utensils at a restaurant. Its almost impossible to find every thing he came in contact with and disinfect it. Plus in case of stuff like utensils, whats to guarantee that they were not mixed with each other and used by other people already.
If some one has been infected due to this by now. It will become impossible to get a realistic perspective of how far this thing would have spread.
In short you are dealing with a exponential growth scenario.Which is why these sort of things are so dangerous.
It could be the case that he was infected 2-3 weeks ago, but since the average time of symptoms showing up is 8-10 days because he was symptom-free before leaving for nyc, he might have thought he was fine.
http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/symptoms/index.html
"A 21 day period for quarantine may result in the release of individuals with a 0.2 – 12% risk of release prior to full opportunity for the incubation to proceed."
http://currents.plos.org/outbreaks/article/on-the-quarantine...