blah blah blah strawberry sandwich

Crossposted all over the goddamned place because I am furious about short-sighted xenophobes who opt for fear over reason.

THIS IS A TERRIBLE IDEA. There’s an Ebola epidemic in West Africa that is rapidly spiralling out of control, but which is small enough now that a strong, concerted effort to stop it now can probably get it under control within the next couple of months. We can (maybe) keep the number of cases in the tens of thousands. Or, without intervention, we could see over a million cases by early next year.

What’s an excellent way to encourage doctors and other health workers to go work hard in difficult conditions and risk their lives to help stop the epidemic? How about we make sure that once they return, they can’t do anything for three weeks?

How dare doctors take time out of their busy schedules to go risk their lives for the good of humanity, and then come home and go bowling? How dare they consider a return to their normal lives, when their chance of spreading illness is almost nil?

Better that they stay home. Better that nobody goes to Liberia or Sierra Leone or Guinea and risk bringing Ebola back to the “developed world”. Why try to prevent millions of deaths in West Africa? Why try to contain it there?

The people who contracted Ebola in the US and Spain were health care workers who were treating severely ill Ebola patients. Their cases were caught early, and they have recovered.

Ebola is not contagious when not symptomatic, and gets more contagious the worse the condition gets. Even though Thomas Eric Duncan was quite ill before he was hospitalized and isolated, nobody caught Ebola from him until he was in the hospital. Everyone he was in contact with before has passed quarantine. The doctor in New York went bowling when he felt tired. Once he had a fever, he quickly isolated himself and went to the hospital. Nobody on the subway was putting his vomit, blood, and feces in their mouths and eyes. Nobody in the community is going to get ill from him.