ER life, from a nurse working as a lifeguard in the shallow end of the gene pool.
Friday, November 7, 2014
Banana Republic Government 101
In case you were paying close attention, you may have noticed that Sierra Leone suddenly removed 500 dead people from their country's tally Sunday.(Did those 500 people not die? Were they resurrected? Undead? Zombified? The mind boggles.) Now, another lesson on why things in West Africa are worse than you can imagine, and worse than we can know. When the news is bad, they simply arrest the messenger:
FREETOWN (NYT) -- In what reporters in Sierra Leone denounced as an abuse of the government’s emergency powers to deal with the spread of Ebola, one of the country’s most prominent broadcast journalists was detained this week after he devoted a segment of his popular radio program to a critical discussion of President Ernest Bai Koroma’s handling of the outbreak.
The radio host, David Tam-Baryoh, was arrested on Monday following a broadcast of his weekly program “Monologue” on the independent station Citizen FM. Listeners in Freetown told the Committee to Protect Journalists that Saturday’s episode was interrupted after Mr. Tam-Baryoh interviewed an opposition spokesman who criticized the president’s response to the Ebola crisis and his supposed interest in seeking a third term in office.
According to Umaru Fofana, who reports for the BBC and the Freetown news site Politico, a senior police official said that Mr. Tam-Baryoh was arrested as a result of “an executive order signed by his excellency the president.” The same officer said that the detention would last “until it pleases his excellency” to release the reporter.
Mohamed Massaquoi, a local newspaper editor who is the president of the Sierra Leone Reporters Union, denounced the arrest as an abuse of the president’s powers. In an interview with Daniel Finnan of Radio France International, he said, “We are under health emergency, we are not under public emergency.”
If you are going to arrest journalists simply because of saying the facts,” he added, “then it’s a shame to the government, it’s a shame to the people of Sierra Leone.”
The arrest was front-page news in Sierra Leone. Ms. Sylvia Blyden, a former close adviser to the president who resigned last month, has also criticized the health ministry, saying it underreported cases of Ebola.
The media's embargo on news about Ebola cases in the US is going to create big problems, I think, because an outbreak here will overwhelm lots of people at once if you cannot be warned of which places to stay away from.
And so the script, once the events become out of control then the government begins to lie and arrest those who speak the truth. Eventually only the survivors will know the true scale of deaths.
OT as in back in the USA: See the last item here (using this link to avoid nagging by the Boston Globe). None of Boston's top teaching hospitals are volunteering to become the Massachusetts Ebola Magnet Hospital of Excellence, surprise, surprise.
Also not surprising is mention of how intense treating an Ebola patient is, and why the 10 bed Omaha hospital is only volunteering for 2 cases at a time. Besides intense staffing requirements (40-60 people), the ward wasn't truly set up to handle Ebola cases, one room has been set for the laboratory (elsewhere (Drudge??) I came across a USA Today article on how unwilling lab machine manufacturers are to service them if touched by Ebola), and one each for clean and dirty supplies.
One of my other contacts is telling me Bellevue has cleared out their entire ICU to take care of Idiot Spencer (meaning all the hospital's critical cases have to be transferred out from surgery and the ER indefinitely), and the current census for the entire 968-bed THP-Dallas hospital is now in the single digits, and they'll go bankrupt forever shortly, before the lawsuits even get started.
The media's embargo on news about Ebola cases in the US is going to create big problems, I think, because an outbreak here will overwhelm lots of people at once if you cannot be warned of which places to stay away from.
ReplyDeleteAnd so the script, once the events become out of control then the government begins to lie and arrest those who speak the truth.
ReplyDeleteEventually only the survivors will know the true scale of deaths.
OT as in back in the USA: See the last item here (using this link to avoid nagging by the Boston Globe). None of Boston's top teaching hospitals are volunteering to become the Massachusetts Ebola Magnet Hospital of Excellence, surprise, surprise.
ReplyDeleteAlso not surprising is mention of how intense treating an Ebola patient is, and why the 10 bed Omaha hospital is only volunteering for 2 cases at a time. Besides intense staffing requirements (40-60 people), the ward wasn't truly set up to handle Ebola cases, one room has been set for the laboratory (elsewhere (Drudge??) I came across a USA Today article on how unwilling lab machine manufacturers are to service them if touched by Ebola), and one each for clean and dirty supplies.
Thanks hga!
ReplyDeleteOne of my other contacts is telling me Bellevue has cleared out their entire ICU to take care of Idiot Spencer (meaning all the hospital's critical cases have to be transferred out from surgery and the ER indefinitely), and the current census for the entire 968-bed THP-Dallas hospital is now in the single digits, and they'll go bankrupt forever shortly, before the lawsuits even get started.