“Christie’s Questionable Judgment”: The Curious Case Of Kaci Hickox’s Quarantine
On Friday, Kaci Hickox, a Doctors Without Borders nurse, arrived back in the United States after helping treat patients in West Africa. It was not a happy return: after arriving at an airport in New Jersey, officials put her in quarantine.
Hickox’s isolation is the result of a new policy endorsed last week by Govs. Chris Christie (R) of New Jersey and Andrew Cuomo (D) of New York, who announced new guidelines requiring 21-day quarantines for those arriving from West Africa – whether they’re showing symptoms or not.
The result is a scenario that seems hard to believe: New Jersey has effectively detained a nurse in a tent with no shower, not because she’s showing symptoms of the Ebola virus, but because officials fear she might at some point show symptoms of the Ebola virus.
Christie defended the mandatory quarantine, saying the nurse was “obviously ill.” This was apparently obvious only to the governor – who has no background in medicine or public health – and was clearly not obvious to Hickox herself.
Christie boasted on one of the Sunday shows yesterday, “I absolutely have no second thoughts about it,” adding that he expects his policy to soon become “a national policy.” A few hours later, however, second thoughts emerged.
Facing fierce resistance from the White House and medical experts to a strict new mandatory quarantine policy, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Sunday night that medical workers who had contact with Ebola patients in West Africa but did not show symptoms of the disease would be allowed to remain at home and would receive compensation for lost income. […]
After Mr. Cuomo’s announcement, Mr. Christie issued a statement saying that, under protocols announced on Wednesday, New Jersey residents not displaying symptoms would also be allowed to quarantine in their homes.
The shifts came on the heels of White House pressure on Cuomo and Christie, urging them to adopt policies more in line with science. It’s unclear whether the revised approach will allow Hickox to leave her state-mandated tent.
There are a few angles to this to keep in mind, not the least of which the dubious legality of New Jersey imposing a mandatory quarantine on a woman who’s reportedly asymptomatic. Forcing medical professionals to remain in their homes for 21 days is marginally better, at least with regards to their personal convenience, but remains problematic. Indeed, by the same reasoning, states would have to impose similar penalties on doctors and nurses treating an Ebola patient in the United States.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top Ebola expert at the National Institutes of Health, warned on “Meet the Press” yesterday of “unintended consequences” – the more we discourage public-health workers from treating Ebola patients, the worse the threat becomes.
This isn’t complicated. The best way to deal with Ebola is to treat the problem at the source: West Africa. There are American medical professionals who are willing to make an enormous sacrifice by traveling abroad to address this crisis, but if the United States discourages them, they’ll help fewer patients, the virus will spread, and the threat will become more severe.
In other words, a policy intended to keep Americans safe will likely put Americans at greater risk.
As for the politics, about a week ago, Christie seemed eager to be one of the more sensible voices in his party, warning of unnecessary “hysteria” surrounding Ebola. To be sure, the governor hasn’t devolved into Rand Paul-esque nuttiness, but Christie unilaterally locking up a healthy nurse for three weeks raises credible questions about his judgment.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 27, 2014
“Ebola And America’s Childish Narcissism”: We, As A Country, Have Never Been Good At Keeping Things In Perspective
I don’t start many columns like this, but kudos to Fox News and specifically host Shepard Smith for decimating this Ebola hysteria the other day. David Ignatius of The Washington Post picked up on Smith’s sentiment with an equally solid column. Ignatius quoted Smith thus: “Today, given what we know, you should have no concerns about Ebola at all. None. I promise. Unless a medical professional has contacted you personally and told you of some sort of possible exposure, fear not. Do not listen to the hysterical voices on the radio and the television or read the fear-provoking words online.”
I’ll go them one better. It’s moments like this one that bring out the absolute worst in the media, some political figures, and, it must be said, a hell of a lot of regular people, too—all of which is to say, the country. America is a narcissistic and inward-looking society at the best of the times. At the worst of times, it’s something even worse; a country with utterly no understanding of the pain and struggle and banal, recurrent death that the rest of the world lives with on a daily basis. So not only should we not panic, but beyond that, instead of turning ever-more inward, this Ebola moment should be precisely the time when we pause and look around the globe and realize how insignificant (though yes of course tragic on their own terms) three deaths are.
In the amount of time it probably took you to read the above two paragraphs, two African children died of malaria. That’s one every 30 seconds, every minute, every hour, every day, every month, every grinding year. And this constitutes a bit of an improvement over 10 or 20 years ago. Many of these children are under five years old. Such an abattoir would never be permitted to continue in the United States, or indeed the developed (and white) world. It would be very wrong of course to say the world does nothing about it. Many amazing people devote their lives to changing this, but somehow it does not change enough, and in recent years the malaria situation has been made even worse by what is to me the single most despicable human activity I’ve ever heard of in my life this side of the gas chambers—the sale of fake anti-malarial drugs for profit.
Want to worry about children? Read the speech given Thursday in the United Arab Emirates by Antonio Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Half of the world’s millions of refugees are children, and they live lives of wretched, numbing upheaval and violence. Guterres: “We know that refugee children are at increased risk of child labor and recruitment, and more vulnerable to violence in their homes, communities, or schools, including sexual and gender-based violence. This is one of the reasons, along with financial difficulties, why more and more refugee parents agree to marry off their daughters as children.”
Queen Raina of Jordan also spoke, calling the refugee crisis in Syria “a slap in the face of humanity.” And, she might well have added, of her country, and of Lebanon, both of which have taken in millions of Syrians, placing burdens on those countries’ infrastructures that Americans couldn’t begin to imagine. Lebanon’s Syrian refugee population is equal to 25 percent of its native population. Could you imagine the United States taking in a like number of Latin American refugees? That would be 75 million people! Our right wing went absolutely ballistic this past summer over 60,000 kids, who came here for reasons we helped create. There is all this churning violence out there of which probably 90 percent of Americans are barely aware. In so much of the world, death and violence are just normal parts of life. And to the response “tough, that’s their problem,” there are at least three good retorts.
The first is that we shouldn’t be so holier than thou, because it wasn’t really that long ago in historical terms that death and violence were normal parts of American life as well. This was an extremely dark and brutal (and insalubrious) country well into the 20th century. It was only really after World War II, after the spread of the general prosperity, that violent death and disease were checked in most of the United States. Vast pockets of both continued to exist well after that—in Appalachia and the inner cities, for example—and some exist still. So our “right” to feel smug about these kinds of things is rather new.
Second, we can’t fail to acknowledge that we played a role in making some of this violence happen. It’s unquestionably true with respect to the countries of Central America whence the border-crisis kids were arriving in June. It’s also undeniably the case in Iraq, where our war created millions of refugees and is still doing so (1.2 million so far this year alone, according to the UNHCR). Where our culpability isn’t that direct—Egypt, say, or Gaza—there are regimes imposing violence on helpless people that obviously could not do so without American billions.
Third, well, I happen to be an American, but I recognize, and you should too, that that’s as accidental a reality as anything could possibly be. So I lucked out in the old ovarian lottery, and the little zygote that became me happened to have been formed inside a particular set of borders. I’ve never understood why that should free me of the obligation to worry about those who didn’t have my luck. All the more reason to, I’d have thought.
All societies are like ours to some extent. Lord knows, many are more chauvinistic. But here’s where I think we are unique: in our continued capacity to be shocked that anything terrible could happen to us. This has everything to do with the narrative we are fed and, in a continuous loop through the media (not just news media, but all media, Hollywood and the rest), feed and re-feed to ourselves. We are exceptional. These things don’t happen here. I remember thinking not long after September 11: Why was everyone so shocked? True, the audacity of it was shocking, so there’s that. But they’d tried to do it before to the World Trade Center, and anyway, nearly everyone else in the world lives with this kind of thing, albeit on a less operatic scale. I was surprised only that it took them that long to deliver a blow like that to our shores.
But the point now is that nothing is on our shores. Shepard Smith is right. So it isn’t happening to us, and yet we’re acting like it is, and while we’re not exactly forgetting the people it actually is happening to, we are certainly diminishing their far worse suffering.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 18, 2014
“Are You Ready For Some Terror?”: The Irrational Republican ISIS-Ebola Brigade
I don’t know if Ebola is actually going to take Republicans to victory this fall, but it’s becoming obvious that they are super-psyched about it. Put a scary disease together with a new terrorist organization and the ever-present threat of undocumented immigrants sneaking over the border, and you’ve got yourself a putrid stew of fear-mongering, irrationality, conspiracy theories, and good old-fashioned Obama-hatred that they’re luxuriating in like it was a warm bath on a cold night.
It isn’t just coming from the nuttier corners of the right where you might expect it. It’s going mainstream. One candidate after another is incorporating the issue into their campaign. Scott Brown warns of people with Ebola walking across the border. Thom Tillis agrees: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got an Ebola outbreak, we have bad actors that can come across the border. We need to seal the border and secure it.” “We have to secure the border. That is the first thing,” says Pat Roberts, “And in addition, with Ebola, ISIS, whoever comes across the border, the 167,000 illegals who are convicted felons, that shows you we have to secure the border and we cannot support amnesty.” Because really, what happens if you gave legal status to that guy shingling your roof, and the next thing you know he’s a battle-hardened terrorist from the ISIS Ebola brigade who was sent here to vomit on your family’s pizza? That’s your hope and change right there.
Nor is it just candidates. Today the Weekly Standard, organ of the Republican establishment, published an article called “Six Reasons to Panic,” which includes insights like “even if this Ebola isn’t airborne right now, it might become so in the future,” and asks, “What’s to stop a jihadist from going to Liberia, getting himself infected, and then flying to New York and riding the subway until he keels over?” What indeed? This follows on a piece in the Free Beacon (which is the junior varsity Weekly Standard) called “The Case For Panic,” which argued that the Obama administration is so incompetent that everything that can kill us probably will.
Even if most people aren’t whipped up into quite the frenzy of terror Republicans hope, I suspect that there will be just enough who are to carry the GOP across the finish line in November. When people are afraid, they’re more likely to vote Republican, so it’s in Republicans’ interest to make them afraid. And you couldn’t come up with a better vehicle for creating that fear than a deadly disease coming from countries full of dark-skinned foreigners. So what if only two Americans, both health care workers caring for a dying man, have actually caught it? You don’t need facts to feed the fear. And they only need two and a half more weeks.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 17, 2014
“Unreasoning Dread”: Freaking Out About Ebola Isn’t Helping
One afternoon two weeks ago, I did my best to calm a friend who’d become fearful that her son would contract Ebola in Syria. The young man had enlisted in the National Guard. She knew the U.S. was bombing ISIS terrorists there, and that people were talking about “boots on the ground.” She thought she’d heard about a Syrian Ebola outbreak on TV.
Because others were listening, I didn’t want to embarrass her. I suggested she’d misheard a reference to Sierra Leone, a tiny country in the tropical forest of West Africa where the Ebola epidemic rages — thousands of miles from Syria, which borders on Israel. The road to Damascus and all that.
The Bible reference helped. A guy in a John Deere cap backed me up. Syria was definitely not in Africa. My friend was mollified.
I’m sure she’s heard plenty more about Ebola since then, possibly even about Sierra Leone, a nation of which most Americans have zero knowledge. A lifelong map nut, I’d have had to search for it myself.
Although my friend is an intelligent person with a lively wit, it wasn’t her ignorance of geography I found so surprising. After all, polls showed only 17 percent of Americans could locate Iraq on a map back when the U.S. invaded in 2003. Rather, it was her unreasoning dread of Ebola, a tropical disease wholly limited at that time to three countries in West Africa.
Now that a single Ebola victim from neighboring Liberia has made his way to Dallas, isn’t that fear more justifiable? Shouldn’t we be running around with our hair on fire like the talking heads on cable TV? Isn’t it time for our government to do something drastic, such as banning all travel from West Africa to prevent Ebola-stricken refugees from bringing this terrifying plague to America?
Actually, no and no. Freaking out never helps when there’s real danger. For once, I felt sympathetic toward Gov. Rick Perry, who, because the Liberian victim ended up at Texas Health Presbyterian in Dallas, was compelled to act like a competent government official instead of a carnival barker.
“Rest assured that our system is working as it should,” Perry said during a hospital press conference. “Professionals on every level of the chain of command know what to do to minimize this potential risk to the people of Texas and this country.”
Of course that wasn’t strictly true. Due to a communications snafu too common in hospitals, the first physician who examined the victim wasn’t told he’d traveled from Liberia, misread the chart, and bungled the diagnosis.
But that still doesn’t mean the sky is falling. Medical experts agree that while deadly in Third World environments, Ebola is both treatable and relatively hard to catch. Patients aren’t contagious until they’re visibly ill. Even then direct contact with a symptomatic person’s bodily fluids — saliva, vomit, stool, urine, etc. — is necessary. Unlike a cold, it can’t be transmitted through the air.
Writing in The New Yorker, brilliant surgeon and author Atul Gawande documents a South African case in which some 300 hospital workers treated an undiagnosed Ebola patient for 12 days without contracting the disease.
Isolate patients, monitor their intimate contacts, dispose of their waste properly, and Ebola can be stopped. According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) the likelihood of a mass Ebola outbreak in the United States is remote.
Perhaps that makes the disgraceful performance of so many self-styled “conservative” pundits and GOP politicians a bit less disturbing. Going all Chicken Little and doing everything possible to use a public health crisis for partisan ends would be even more contemptible if the danger were as great as they pretend.
As usual, Fox News personalities led the charge. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee sought to use Ebola to foment petulant mistrust of government in general and President Obama in particular.
It all somehow reminded him of Benghazi.
“The Ebola scare,” Huckabee claimed “goes to the heart of a simple question: do you trust the government. Audience, do you trust the government?”
Fox News and ABC News contributor Laura Ingraham hosted crank medical conspiracy theorist Dr. Elizabeth Vliet, who accused Obama of downplaying Ebola for political reasons. Rush Limbaugh suggested that the president sees Ebola as a punishment for slavery, and won’t ban travel to and from West Africa out of political correctness.
Several GOP politicians, including Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, have suggested basically quarantining entire countries, a “solution” that sounds sensible until you think about it for 30 seconds.
For example, would that mean volunteer doctors, nurses, missionaries and soldiers couldn’t come home? And then what? A catastrophically worsening epidemic in Africa, that’s what.
I’ll say this too: If Ebola were happening, in say, Denmark or Belgium, we’d be having a far saner conversation.
But then it couldn’t, which is part of the point.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, October 8, 2014
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