mersenneforum.org - Ye Olde Mystery economic theatre 2014

(Torn as to where to post this, didn't want to start a new thread, but as the economic ramifications parallel the human suffering, here we are.)

Ebola hops the next plane out -- "Lying liars and incompetent fools are putting us all at risk" alert:

[url=mobile.nytimes.com/2014/10/04/us/containing-ebola-cdc-troops-west-africa.html]Dallas Hospital Alters Account, Raising Questions on Ebola Case[/url]
[quote]DALLAS — Health officials’ handling of the first Ebola patient diagnosed in the United States continued to raise questions Friday, after the hospital that is treating the patient and that mistakenly sent him home when he first came to its emergency room acknowledged that both the nurses and the doctors in that initial visit had access to the fact that he had arrived from Liberia.[/quote]
If the staff were as 'competent' as the average American at geography, they probably thought Liberia was a Canadian province, or "that peninsula with Spain and Portugal on it."
[quote]For reasons that remain unclear, nurses and doctors failed to act on that information, and released the patient [b]under the erroneous belief that he had a low-grade fever from a viral infection[/b], allowing him to put others at risk of contracting Ebola. Those exposed included several schoolchildren, and the exposure has the potential to spread a disease in Dallas that has already killed more than 3,000 people in Africa.[/quote]
That admission still trips the BS-o-meter, because if they thought he had an unspecified viral infection, why did they send him home with an Rx for antibiotics, which are useless against viruses? [Perhaps they model their response on a typical [i]House[/i] episode: Bombard patient with expensive drugs and hope resulting side effects reveal true causal agent before they kill the patient. (Somehow in [i]House[/i] bankrupting the patient is never invoked as an intermediate outcome.)

But OTOH why would we expect any glimmer of competence on the part of the hospital staff? After all, this is a place where key public officials tell obvious and dangerous whoppers of lies on a routine basis:
[quote]“I want to see them treated as I would want my own family treated,” said County Judge Clay Jenkins, the top elected official of Dallas County, who visited the family inside the apartment on Thursday night and again on Friday, when he drove them to an undisclosed location, where they will remain under quarantine.

Mr. Jenkins and other officials described their temporary home as a four-bedroom residence “away from other people” on a multi-acre property within the city limits, donated for them by an unnamed member of the Dallas faith community.

“I’m a married man with a little girl who will have her ninth birthday next week,” Mr. Jenkins told reporters. “I’m wearing the same shirt I was when I was in the car with that family.” He added: “If there were any risk, I would not expose myself or my family to that risk. But [b]there is zero risk. These people are asymptomatic[/b].”[/quote]
Right ... because asymptomatic = uninfected. Jenkins: "All I know about epidemiology I learned in Sunday school."

And at the federal level officials are peddling soothing PR balm about "containment" and "the system is sound" which sound eerily like those in the year leading up to the global financial crisis. And illogic abounds, e.g. here with respect to proposals for a travel ban from the Hot Zone countries:
[quote]But federal officials flatly rejected the idea of expanding the screening of passengers arriving from West Africa, and said they would not support calls for a ban on travel to the United States from countries being ravaged by the disease. They said [b]such moves would be ineffective and, at worst, could prevent medical workers and other assistance from reaching Africa[/b].[/quote]
Ineffective, because such a ban wouldn't have kept folks like the guy who came back infected from coming back ... oh wait, it would have, wouldn't it? And re. "prevent medical workers and other assistance from reaching Africa" - the proposed travel restrictions are on flights *from* the hot zone, not *to* it.

(I understand there is an "how would medical staff be able to return after a tour of duty?" angle to it, but I have no problem with special exemptions for flights organized by governments and aid agencies for such purposes - folks on those flights could and should be subject to a period of mandatory supervised quarantine on return, and would have departed with full knowledge of this requirement. It's the unsupervised commercial travel that should be suspended.)

[quote]Administration officials have spent the last several weeks repeatedly offering assurances that the American health system was well equipped to seamlessly handle the virus if it arrived on the country’s shores. President Obama has said several times that he has confidence in the C.D.C.[/quote]
Does the incompetence, lies and anafu-riddled response in Dallas strike anyone as "seamless"? Does the fallout from this single (so far) patient there strike anyone as "scalable to epidemic levels"? Let's hope we get lucky and don't have to find out - but luck and 'faith' are poor substitutes for preparedness.