And now the Big Apple will start to bake:
A New York City doctor has tested positive for Ebola after returning from work in West Africa with an aid agency, the first case of the deadly disease diagnosed in the most populous U.S. city.
The doctor, Craig Spencer, 33, is being treated in an isolation unit at Bellevue Hospital Center.
And does Bellevue Hospital Center know how and is it equipped to treat ebola?
Nope:
Samples of Spencer’s blood will be sent to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta for confirmation, the CDC said.
A CDC team will help health workers at Bellevue safely care for him while trying to track down anybody he may have had close contact with while he was sick.
“We have a team that’s readying to deploy to New York,” said Tom Skinner, a spokesman for the CDC. “It’s composed of epidemiologists, infection control, data management, and communications officers.” [emphasis added]
In a city of over eight million people in a very small area. Did Dr. Spencer drive, or take the subway? Or public transit buses? How many people did he interact with or closely pass at JFK? On the flight back from Guinea? He probably exposed hundreds of people to ebola. How does the CDC track all those people down? How do they know which ones to contact? Or if they can find them all even if they know who all to contact? This is like Where's Waldo? on steroids. It's insane. It can't be done.
And then there are the people closest to him, who are already presumed exposed:
The four are Spencer’s fiancee, two friends, and an Uber car service driver who had Spencer as a passenger, New York City Health Commissioner Mary Bassett said.
God willing, none of these four persons will have contracted ebola. But suppose one does. Or two. Or all four. It's the scenario above squared, or cubed, or quadrupled. The Uber car service driver is considered a low risk, and Gotham health officials better hope and pray so, because otherwise everybody that's been in that vehicle adds to this logarithmic baseline.
Shouldn't it be standard operating procedure for all U.S. personnel, civilian or military, going to West Africa to serve in combatting this epidemic that once their "tour of duty" is complete, they be assumed to have been exposed and go into mandatory quarantine for the incubation period (twenty-one days) and not be released to return Stateside until that period is completed without exhibiting any symptoms? Or maybe an extra week tacked on, just to be on the safe side? Absolutely no exceptions? God bless Dr. Spencer, but why was he allowed to return without ensuring that he didn't have the virus?
I do not relish being the bearer of bad news, folks, but isn't it pretty clear that ebola is now loose and completely out of control in this country, the authorities haven't the foggiest notion who has it or where or who and how many have been exposed? That they've been completely reactive, taken it appallingly lightly, vastly underestimated the virus's communicability and grotesquely overestimated their ability to deal with it? That it's going to boil right through the U.S. population until approximately 70% of us are dead or, hopefully, it burns itself out first?
The only factor to be determined is how quickly ebola will spread. Will it be the wildfire-like three weeks of the "Captain Trips" superflu in The Stand? Four weeks as with the zombie virus in 28 Days? A few months? Nobody knows. All we can do is hope and pray for the best and prepare for the worst.
And remember who was responsible for needlessly letting a highly communicable, 70% fatal disease into this country in the first place - and ponder the reasons why.
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