Why To Be Worried — But Not To Be Scared
Given everything that’s happened, who can blame Americans for being nervous?
Officials stressed the Ebola epidemic in Africa was going to be contained. Then it mushroomed to the worst Ebola outbreak in history and jumped an ocean, as a Liberian man named Thomas E. Duncan
brought the disease to Texas this week.
The CDC then vowed that they would “stop Ebola in its tracks.” But starting on Tuesday, U.S. officials began contradicting themselves. First they said that Duncan had potentially exposed 18 other people, before revising that estimate to nearly 80 people, before revising it again to 100 people (as of Thursday night).
The contradictory responses don’t inspire confidence. Nor do the challenges at the Texas hospital that initially received Duncan but
sent him home for four days because staff didn’t realize he’d been in Liberia.
Even ZMapp — the Ebola-fighting wonder drug that may have helped
save the lives of several Ebola patients who were treated at Emory this summer — indirectly shows the failures of the U.S. health system.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/dandiamo...ble-heres-why/
We tend to be most scared of that which we know the least about. Ask someone deathly afraid of snakes what they know about them and it will be relatively little if anything.
What is currently stirring the fear is that we are getting mixed messages. It's not easy to catch but we find out that nurses wearing protective gear contracted it. Now the CDC says that they may have contracted it because they were wearing too much protective gear.
The lack of consistent information does not give confidence to those who want to try educate themselves and understand the disease.
Then there is complete misinformation about entire towns being quarantined, by satirical websites, which stirs everyone up.
Three schools were closed today around Dallas because students were on that flight with the nurse that traveled from Cleveland to Dallas and they are scrubbing the schools down.
The WHO is not endorsing using temperature scanners at airports because they say it will cause panic.
Sounds like the panic has started and is growing quickly. It could very well be more dangerous than the disease itself. At this point who knows? Until we start getting consistent answers from sources we have confidence in the panic will continue.