NYT insults the Middle Ages
Tell me again what's wrong with a quarantine? Not an inflexible travel ban, just a hold on incoming traffic while we either run a rapid-turnaround PCR test, or hold travelers for 21 days to see if they develop symptoms. I know it could get expensive, but compared to what?
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A quarantine would be to stop travel out of the western Africa nations of interest here.
To the extent PCR for ebola actually is feasible, this would be a useful adjunct, but it's inadequate without the testable population greatly reduced, first, by a quarantine.
And the sooner the quarantine is imposed, the smaller the population needing the PCR bit.
Eric Hines
You'd need a lot of bleach, I suppose. The place of quarantine is going to include at least some people who have been exposed, and the disease apparently survives in fluids for some time. So you'd have to put people in strict isolation -- otherwise they'd infect each other, and the guy who'd been there 21 days might have been infected on day 19.
Don't we have to compare the cost of the bleach program to the only alternative, which is to let them right on through, where they'll all wander around in the general public from day one? Lotta bleach getting used up in Dallas right now.
And yes, I was assuming that the quarantine would be in isolation, not in a cattle-pen. I suppose families could go in together if they wished, but everyone in the group would have to stay put until the most recent member to join had been there 21 days without symptoms. Is that a lot of hotel rooms? Sure, but it still seems like a money-saver in the end. A few hundred people a day are now trying to travel here from the most affected countries. That number probably would drop if people didn't like the idea of a quarantine. Every time a single infected person gets loose, we have to put up to 100 people under strict observation.
If I thought we could trust Liberia et al. for one second, I'd suggest that the quarantine should occur there.
Eric, I'm not sure I understand your concerns about the feasibility of the PCR test, even on a scale of several hundred tests a day.
Their tune will change as soon as there is an Ebola case in NYC. Just watch.
My concern is to reduce the load on the PCR labs doing the testing. If we can reduce the population needing the testing, we should. Absent a quarantine, every traveler and every person with whom a traveler came in contact would need the PCR.
I'm also concerned that the PCR, in its initial test, missed a third of those who actually had Ebola, and a subsequent tweak only "increased its sensitivity." A quarantine also will reduce the likelihood of an infectee getting through.
Neither system is proof against spread, but both together would be a marked improvement, both over nothing and over either used alone.
Eric Hines
I think the PCR capacity in the U.S. may be greater than you think; we use it for all kinds of cancer tests already, not just for unusual diseases like Ebola. In 2000, the PCR error rate was high, but the current false-positive and false-negative rates are 3 and 4 in a thousand, which is pretty good.
But I don't disagree that it would be good to cut down on the volume of traffic from the hardest-hit countries.
I don't even like to think about all the servicemen who are being sent into who-knows-what conditions, or what it's going to be like for the Veterans Administration to try to treat the inevitable cases among them. Maybe Emory Hospital can control the transmission of Ebola infection, but Texas Presbyterian in Dallas apparently can't. Does anyone believe the average Vet hospital can? My confidence in first-world medical expertise took a big hit this week. Apparently the differences in fanatical hospital procedure that produce big variations in staph infection rates are going to bite us in the butt on Ebola, too.
And Eric B., yes, I agree.
In 2000, the PCR error rate was high, but the current false-positive and false-negative rates are 3 and 4 in a thousand....
Error rates for what protein? PCR has been around, and effectively so, with vanishingly small amounts of DNA (for instance) since 1983, and it was used to identify population origins and Neanderthal vs Cro Magnon migration patterns in Europe from 20k- and 30k-year-old DNA.
Seventeen years later, though, in 2000, the error rate was more than 35% (in a tiny sample). The process has to be tailored to the protein being sought after, and that error rate for an Ebola-unique protein with a 17-yr-old procedure does not give me a lot of confidence.
Even accepting your optimistic error rate of 3/1000, in a potentially infected population of 1,000,000 across our three African nations combined, that's 3,000 infectees running around loose on the outside of the quarantine and testing régime.
Eric Hines
Somehow I think even this administration would take action if the incoming travelers increased from a couple hundred a day to a million.
In fact, it probably won't reach a million, but absent a quarantine, there will be a significant spike, and we have just the sieve-y borders to let them in. As do Canada and Europe.
Even then, I'm not sanguine that Obama or Frieden will take that sort of action. After all, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea are exceptional nations, too.
Eric Hines
Should quarantine Leftists and blockade starve the Palis.
Would fix a lot of evil with no bombs.
Look on the bright, nobody will have to go to Syria to see the corpse pile, if it so occurs.
Whether people like it or not, the Left is as the Left is. Some see it, others refuse to.
Not hotel rooms. Buy up trailers to park in a guarded section of the airport. Electricity is easy, water shouldn't be too hard, sewage is more of a headache (special treatment?).
"they" will not stop this- it will either stop, or it will not. The government is so infiltrated by political appointees that no action is undertaken contrary to political calculation.
Don't worry, Tea Party, Republicans, and other dissidents and those who Refuse to Obey Authority, will be quarantined and summarily executed and processed for bio fuel soon enough.
Stop complaining, don't worry.
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