The Ebola Farce: A Guest Post by Ol’ Remus of The Woodpile Report

[It’s an all-Ebola weekend here at Liberty’s Torch. To continue the festivities, we have an unflinching, unsparing piece from one of my favorite Web writers, sure to be inducted into the Calls ‘Em As They Sees ‘Em Hall of Fame immediately upon his retirement despite the statutory five-year hiatus before eligibility begins. (I’ve already spoken to the Commissioner about a waiver.) -- FWP]

Prediction. Our institutional defenses against epidemics assume 1950s-style civic support. Those days are gone. Even so, it'll work for a while, not perfectly, but well enough. For a while. Ebola will go exponential when it gets into our Haiti-like urban areas and separatist enclaves. Necessary but inconvenient countermeasures will be widely evaded, denounced as genocide in disguise. Those who demand drastic action in defense of the nation will be slandered as paleo-rednecks.

From then on events will be decided by doddering civil rights agitators, the gullible morons who support them and lunatic opportunists in DC. Naturally those who are actually stricken will demand priority on a "Poor, Minorities Hit Hardest" basis. The irony will go unnoticed. Worthwhile results will be either accidental or unavoidable. Ebola will burn its way through the populace all but unimpeded, and when the last victim collapses in a mushy pile of its own bloody excretions, victory will be declared. Heroes will be acclaimed and every faction in the country will have made new, enduring enemies. This is easy. It's like predicting the past. But, details. We want details.

Our farce thus far. How competent are our medical institutions with their world-class facilities and internationally renown experts, the same experts who tell us our fears are unfounded? Apparently word hadn't gotten to them that people coming from Ebola-infested pest holes in Africa may have Ebola, duh, including one who exhibited advanced symptoms and offered himself up:

Thomas Eric Duncan told a nurse at a Dallas emergency room that he had recently visited Liberia, which has been ravaged by the Ebola outbreak. But an executive at Texas Health Presbyterian hospital told a news conference that the information was not widely enough shared with the medical team treating Duncan, and he was diagnosed as suffering from a “low-grade common viral disease”.

-- Gambino and Dart at theguardian.com --

As a result of this lapse, Thomas Duncan was able to leave the hospital and interact with more people while experiencing symptoms, which is when the virus becomes contagious.

-- Mark Berman at washingtonpost.com --

He didn't go to a first aid outfit in some backwater town. He went to Texas Health Presbyterian, one of those outfits with nice corporate graphics which busies itself with "raising awareness" and gives itself awards. Top shelf, in other words. Here's how obvious it had to be before he they admitted and isolated him:

“When the ambulance came his whole family were all screaming, he got outside and he was throwing up all over the place … when he was throwing up he was trying to walk and he couldn’t walk.”

-- Mesud Osmanovic, neighbor, to Gambino and Dart at theguardian.com --

Which means from the 24th to the 28th of September he was stumbling around loose among the people of Dallas with infectious Ebola , and he did so until his nephew called CDC directly—which, incidentally, suggests the reason for his trip here in the first place. He all but handed them a signed affidavit with "I HAVE EBOLA" across the top in all caps, yet Texas hospital says:

Regretfully, that information was not fully communicated throughout the full teams. As a result, the full import of that information wasn’t factored into the full decision making.

-- Mark Lester, Texas hospital, via news.yahoo.com --

We fully understand. He wasn't coughing up lung tissue or spurting blood from his eyeballs so hoo cudda fully node. But just a few days before Mr. Duncan arrived, none other than President Obama assured us:

We've been taking the necessary precautions, including working with countries in West Africa to increase screening at airports so that someone with the virus doesn't get on a plane for the United States. In the unlikely event that someone with Ebola does reach our shores, we've taken new measures so that we're prepared here at home.

In Obama's defense, he's a liar. His core supporters believe him, who can ask for better evidence? No sense in getting all worked up about it. Some people are left handed, some people are short and others tall, some people stutter. Obama lies. It's just his way. He can't help it so let it be.

Cynics say Duncan was knowingly set loose, that this is a trial run for a Club of Rome-style population reduction. How else does a driver for FedEx in Monrovia come up with airfare—about $3,500 one way—and a visa, apparently on short notice, they ask. Others say it's a psy-op calculated to prod the populace into demanding a national lockdown under martial law.

Look what we have on the other side. Texas Health Presbyterian "regrets" their incompetence. They'll take even newer measures so that we're even more prepared here at home. Measures like a seminar, say. Off site. Nassau perhaps. Signup is by the door. Not a compelling counter argument. Denying entry to travelers with West African passports is a compelling counter argument. So is defending our borders and controlling immigration. DC is proudly and emphatically doing none of these so "oops" is their only counter argument.

Officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took to the airwaves to assure the public that there is no risk of widespread infection. The reason: The United States has a strong health system and trained health workers who can efficiently and effectively contain Ebola.

-- Ashley Judd at cnn.com --

From farce to tragedy. Let's look at CDC's and Obama's claim American medical facilities are so sophisticated "the chances of an Ebola outbreak here in the United States are extremely low". Assume each suspected Ebola patient in high-level isolation requires eight medical professionals per shift. That's twenty-four per day. Should there be, say, one hundred high-risk patients admitted to isolation, that's 2,400 medical professionals, and all the necessary equipment and supplies for one hundred containment accommodations. It's already unrealistic. No hospital could function with that many diverted assets. Perhaps efficiency measures could bring these numbers down. Or perhaps these numbers are too low to begin with. What if there are not one hundred high-risk patients, but five hundred? Or a thousand.

Use CDC's "RO"—reinfection rate per 21-day cycle—and say one out of every ten high-risk patients is a confirmed case of Ebola. Every person they've been in close contact with is now another high-risk patient. Use twenty each per 21 days. Multiply these new numbers by twenty-four medical professionals each—plus or minus. Now your alternatives are to lower the standard of care to third world levels, or to concede outright defeat and make a run for it. Numbers are numbers, here or in Africa. And oh by the way, it's game over if they start missing one or two infected contacts here and there. Think they won't? There's also an infection rate for the medical professionals. And don't bet against asymptomatic carriers.

Then there's this:

The Texas health commissioner, Dr. David Lakey, told reporters during an afternoon news conference that health workers should have moved more swiftly to clean the apartment but that they had had trouble finding an outside medical team to do the work. They encountered “a little bit of hesitancy,” he said.

-- Sack and Marc Santoraoct at nytimes.com --

There's an old comeback to the self-proclaimed dedicated professional 'serving mankind': would you still do it if you weren't getting paid? Now we have to ask if they'll still do it at a substantial risk to themselves of a painful and gruesome death. The realist says the occupancy rates at exclusive resorts will rise. Rule One for survival applies for everyone everywhere: stay away from crowds.

The bottom line. A realistic mortality estimate has to include secondary effects, which includes a drastic reduction in ordinary medical services, disrupted transportation of food and other necessities, much diminished commercial activity and the like. If we discount "perfect storm" scenarios and stay with the likely, a mortality of 25% in the US is a reasonable estimate, secondary effects included, assuming a burnout time of three years. In 2017 denying visas to West African nationals, defending our borders and controlling immigration will be seen as the missed opportunity of a lot of lifetimes. Alas, that opportunity is foreclosed even now. The mother of all buyer's regret is setting in. The dark side of globalism is about to have its way with us.