The Cellar - What might be making you a tad apprehensive, but might not, as it's too soon to tell

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I was hoping someone would come in and tell me everything is going to be ok.

We have troops in Africa building hospitals. We will have 17 hospitals completed in the next month. But by then we will actually need 170 hospitals. And that's just buildings. Who's gonna staff them?

The small companies making experimental medicines and vaccines are working around the clock, but it's a race, and the virus is spreading exponentially while they progress linearly.

By the time leaders are so scared that they are willing to do something previously unthinkable in scope, that unthinkable action still won't be enough to stop it, because it will have grown.

So that has me wondering about how I can prepare. Can it really get that bad here? I think of Katrina. But that's probably not the right model.

On the other hand, everything is fine right now. And I've got plans for the holiday weekend.

I think we're going to have a regular The Stand going on.

I think there is much they're not telling us.

But all the cool kids are getting iBola...eBola is so yesterday. (A little levity never hurts.)

I think the populace here is smarter (Jesus fucking Christ, my phone autocorrected that to "white"...) So you'd see a lot of people in face masks and gloves, and nobody leaving dead bodies in the street. So maybe preparing would mean stocking up on those. Large portions of our workforce can telecommute, so I bet anyone who could, would.

I think it would be more of a "everything grinds to a halt" scenario, rather than loss of basic necessities like in Katrina. Personally, I really wonder whether we're truly out of the ZMapp drug, or whether we're just keeping it for ourselves.

On the other hand, we've got plans for the weekend too... Although Minifob IS a little sick. ;)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clodfobble (Post 911578)

you'd see a lot of people in face masks and gloves, ...So maybe preparing would mean stocking up on those.

Already have a bunch, but could probably use more. Maybe I'll take a look at our supply this weekend. Haven't checked them out in a few years.

Quote:

Originally Posted by infinite monkey (Post 911577)

I think we're going to have a regular The Stand going on.

Everybody just relax, get a drink, put on your Depends and HazMat suit and enjoy the ride. The president created this disease to destroy Jesus. Unless our borders are closed now, ebola will, as the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic did, kill millions of people.

The bright side is that fewer people will be great for the labor market, the pressure on scarce goods, and maybe even reduce the progress of global warming.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Spexxvet (Post 911587)

The bright side is that fewer people will be great for the labor market, the pressure on scarce goods, and maybe even reduce the progress of global warming.

Fewer people is fewer consumers and less demand, so smaller job growth.

Plus, what if one of those millions of people is somebody I care about, or me?

Quote:

Originally Posted by glatt (Post 911590)

Fewer people is fewer consumers and less demand, so smaller job growth.

Plus, what if one of those millions of people is somebody I care about, or me?

I was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek. If it's me, then I don't have to worry anymore. The key is prevention. Unfortunately our country is reactive, not proactive.

Here's an interesting video. It's about H5N1, but talks about pandemic.

http://www.ted.com/talks/laurie_garr..._flu#t-1017244

Quote:

Originally Posted by Spexxvet (Post 911587)

Unless our borders are closed now...

Because we are already so awesome at this, I feel confident that Texas and Arizona will be the first to fall.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clodfobble (Post 911592)

Because we are already so awesome at this, I feel confident that Texas and Arizona will be the first to fall.

Luckily Ebola ground zero wasn't in Mexico, eh?;)

The UK Government has announced screening of passengers at the two main London airports, Heathrow and Gatwick, and the Eurostar rail terminal in London.
Flights from the worst affected countries tend to arrive at Paris and/or Brussels and passengers can then easily make their way to London via the Eurostar rail link.

One or two passages from a substantial article in today's Daily Telegraph are worth reproducing here.

Quote:

When SARS – severe acute respiratory syndrome – appeared in Asia in 2002, we were told that it had a 25 per cent chance of killing “tens of millions”. There were calls for borders to be locked down, and new arrivals showing symptoms to be locked up. But despite a spike in sales of surgical masks, and the hurried cancellation of thousands of holidays to Hong Kong and Thailand, the disease ended up killing only 775 people worldwide.

Quote:

It was a similar story in 2009 with swine flu. The chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, warned that 65,000 Britons could die, and the government duly spent more than £1.2 billion to prepare for the viral apocalypse. Yet while the disease was incredibly contagious, infecting millions worldwide, it turned out to be relatively mild. In Britain, only 457 people died – a significant number, but 25 times fewer than the 12,000 who are carried away by normal seasonal flu every year. To make matters worse, some experts later claimed that the £424 million spent on stockpiling 40 million doses of Tamiflu had essentially been wasted: its average effect, they said, was to shorten the disease’s duration from seven days to 6.3 (a finding which its manufacturer, Roche, disputed).

Quote:

Ebola’s strengths are, however, outweighed by its weaknesses. If you get it, you’re in very big trouble, but the odds of that are quite small. It is not, unlike the pathogens of our worst nightmares, airborne: it is spread via infected bodily fluids, which have to enter the body via the eyes or mouth or a cut or wound. Moreover, it is quite fragile, meaning that it does not survive long outside of its host – and can be defeated by the simple act of washing one’s hands.

As a result, the “R0” figure of the current outbreak – the technical term for the number of further victims that one sufferer can be expected to infect in turn – is somewhere around 2. That makes it a much slower spreader than Sars, smallpox or the strain of Spanish flu that killed tens of millions of people in the wake of the First World War.

Daily Telegraph

It's worth noting, that the British nurse who was repatriated to the UK having been infected by Ebola in Sierra Leone, made a full recovery.

William Pooley plans return to the fight against Ebola in Sierra Leone

Quote:

Originally Posted by infinite monkey (Post 911577)

I think there is much they're not telling us.

The CDC is kind of serving two masters on this. They have the legitimate public health agenda followed by the sunshine and lollipops agenda to avoid a panic. Its an interesting tension. The funny thing is the gov sees no problem with creating paranoia about ISIS but has reservations about it for Ebola.

Fun question, who beheaded the most humans this year Saudi Arabia or ISIS? hint: Saudi Arabia

Wow. Good points.

Wagging the dog, like.

This is very interesting to me.

Ebola is bound to slip its leash here (has already done so) and turn up all over the continent in minor outbreaks. It's inevitable, given that there are really no constraints on travel. The more important issue is whether/when it will undergo an antigenic shift, as it passes through many more thousands of humans than it ever has before, and take on different characteristics.

It could become less virulent; it could become a nightmare, infecting millions via airborne transmission. It could fade away as SARS did.

In the meantime, carry on. Has anyone noticed that Marburg virus has resurfaced in Uganda?