Qwitcherbitchin', Crybabies

Burning Platform has some whiny rant (and coming from me, that's really saying something) about a guy billed $426 for an $8 can of OTC pain spray.

Well, gee, no shit, Sherlock, and if you'd seen the report from MIT on the topic, or drove by Homeless Depot any time since 1986, you might have noticed those 200 Julios standing outside their branch in Greater Aztlan Assland, which heritage Mexican homeland apparently stretches all the way to Anchorage AKand Bangor ME. (Who knew?) And unlike whom, you have actual insurance.

Oh, and back awhile, your congressweasel voted in EMTALA, mainly in response to anesthesiologists passing gas for docs doing C-sections on pregnant migras who were crowning, and getting sued by them afterwards, but never actually getting, y'know, paid for their twelve years of higher-education services or their $1M expertise. Those bastards!! Doctors should work for free, amIright??
Occupy!

Short story long, if you show up at the ER, yours, mine, anybody's, you get to play, but you don't have to pay. At least, not up front. Unlike, say, your doctor's office, Urgent Care, or - waitaminute - every other commercial establishment in the flipping country, including the DMV and the Post Office.
Well-played, Fucktard Minions of Stupidity.

So, by the by, exactly how long d'ya suppose Mickey D's or Burger King would be open as a business anywhere, if tomorrow Congress passed the WAAH! My Tummy's Rumbling Active Hunger And Deadbeat Wimpy Act of 2018, dictating that anyone who wanted a hamburger now could get it now, solely on the promise to pay for it next Tuesday?

And if you worked at a business similarly burdened, how long would you have a job when that enterprise subsequently went tits-up, in about a New York minute??

And if the pharmacy at Wal-Mart had to hand that spray out for free, how much d'ya figure they'd start charging for kettle corn bags and underpants to subsidize that largesse? Say, somewhere around $426 dollars, just mebbe?

Anyways, they go on to knee-jerk call the price of the pain spray to government regulation and socialism(!), rather than all y'all getting the system you pissed and moaned for, and now finding out you're getting it good and hard.

Then, a couple of comments down, this nugget:

"Husbands bill was over $2000 to tell him his arm wasn’t broken.
Xrays were separate, about $50.
$256.00 for a tetanus shot.
For comparison, i can get a tetanus shot for a horse at tractor supply for $4.00
Tetanus boosters have been around for decades. Not like they’re rare or anything.
This is after sitting there for 4 hours among a couple dozen non English speaking persons."

Some people cannot put two and two together, and come up with the answer.
Let me help:

And that's why you're paying $256 for the shot.
You're paying for all the Julios and Marias and Wangs and Achmeds and Crazy Homeless Alcoholic Eddie guys with no insurance.

And of course they get a bill too (despite another idiot commenter suggesting we don't bill them).
Which we can't make them pay.
If they gave the right address.
If they gave the right name.

And also, because if your husband got an infection from poor injection technique, or they hit a nerve or blood vessel, or the sun was in your eyes, it was $256 to offset insurance premiums, because you'd then sue the hospital for a gazillion $$$. So you have a doctor ordering it, a pharmacist stocking it, and an RN giving it, rather than you grabbing a dose at Tractor Supply, and doing it yourself.

And of course, if he'd just gone to your doctor and gotten the booster himself, on time, months ago, it could have been had for maybe $20 co-pay, or even less than that, right?

Make your congressweasel pass tort reform, stop suing everybody for everything, build the frickin' Wall at the border, start throwing people back over it, get your annual checkups, and quit using the ER for drive-thru Urgent Care.  Now, how much of that is within the hospital or ER's control, and how much is within yours?

Otherwise, pony up. Walking in the door at any ER worth the name starts at about $1500.
If it was open, depending on day of the week/time of day, you could've gotten the same X-ray and treatment at any competent Urgent Care for a few hundred bucks.

People will price-shop for a ten dollar difference on a cell phone, but they won't use common sense about an ER bill of $2K vs. one at Urgent Care of $500.
Genius, right there.

(And if Urgent Care wasn't available for you, for any reason, then let's be reasonable. You had no choice about the ER, that injury hurt - a lot, and you wanted to know now. Fair enough. You want care now, you pay now.
We take cash, check, almost any insurance, and VISA/MC. Tell me they do things different at Burger King and Target when you want a Whopper or a pair of jeans.)

But don't bitch when you got the gold-plated care you demand, at prices your insurance company mostly pays, while you rarely see 10-20% of that cost.

This is the system you wanted, and now it's not so bitchin. I get that.
Now go fix it, as outlined.

I'd chat further, but I'm on duty at the ER tonight.
Where, if someone comes in with a heart attack, and we save their lives via the Cath Lab and first-world medicine that should be the envy of every Swinging Richard in human history since Adam, the only thing they'll remember afterwards, and go online to bitch about afterwards, is that the baby aspirins we gave them were billed at $20@.

So don't take this the wrong way, but as someone who couldn't have made two car payments in their life if they received $100 for every "thank you" heard from patients or families in 20 years of saving actual lives, if you complain about anything but gross negligence or egregious harmful malpractice, like having the wrong leg amputated, please, I beseech you most humbly and sincerely, go and fuck yourselves up the ass with a lit flamethrower, m'kay?

Because If I gave you that enema, I'd bill you for it at the price you deserve, and laugh while I did it.

Maybe when the shift is over, if I feel like it, I'll tell what you ought to be doing, and bitching about.
Knowing full well the odds of you taking such concentrated experiential wisdom is about as good as the odds of you listening to the discharge instructions you get.

And Now, The Serious Lying Starts

(Reuters) - An American nurse who was exposed to Ebola while volunteering in an Ebola treatment unit in Sierra Leone will be admitted to the National Institutes of Health's Clinical Center in Maryland on Thursday, NIH announced.NIH did not release any further information on the nurse, including when he or she might have been exposed to the virus, current medical condition or affiliation.

It is thus apparent that we're not meant to know where she's arriving from, whether and how many people she may have already exposed here or anywhere else, or anything further about the case.

And she's being taken to the one facility (out of four) completely under the control and purview of the U.S. government, from top to bottom. Make of that what you will.

If you aren't continuing to get your personal quarantine ducks in a row, you aren't paying attention.

UPDATE: NBC local affiliate is reporting that the nurse has tested negative for Ebola. So whether she's actually infected is an open question, and/or will accidentally leak out the truism that a negative initial Ebola test doesn't mean you're not infected.
Disinformation Czar Klain will not be pleased.

Still An @$$Clown

CNN screenshot of interview with CDC Director Frieden, who apparently just won't go away.

Some people don't get that the best thing they could do is shut up, and quietly hide in their offices for 5 to 10 years, if not quietly retire to BFEgypt.

Usually, if you weren't clear on the concept, the president appointing a political hack to get the spotlight off of you, then keeping that guy in more seclusion than US nuclear weapons information, is normally a pretty good clue to STFU and slither away.

But hubris is a tough disease to beat, and CDC Director Tom Frieden still has a raging case, as noted in this CNN exclusive interview with him:

(CNN) -- In an exclusive interview with CNN, Dr. Thomas Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reflected on the lowest moments -- and the surprises -- that occurred when Thomas Eric Duncan became the first person to unexpectedly arrive in the United States with Ebola.

Duncan has been the only person in the United States to die of the disease, and two nurses who cared for him became infected with the virus. The CDC was roundly criticized for its handling of the crisis, and some Republican lawmakers called for Frieden's resignation.

Frieden's lowest moment: when the first nurse, Nina Pham, was diagnosed with Ebola.

"We learned that the situation wasn't going to be as simple or as controlled as we thought it would be, and we immediately intensified our response to address the situation in Dallas," he said.

He said his biggest surprise was the difficulty of Duncan's care.

 

"I think we didn't recognize how hard it would be to care for someone with Ebola who was desperately ill in the U.S., and how much hands-on nursing care there would be, and we didn't expect two nurses to get infected," Frieden said. 

Gotcha Tommy. You only misunderstood the disease itself, how to treat it, and how to prevent its spread. Say, by the by, what's the NAME of your agency again...?

During Duncan's hospitalization, Frieden repeatedly said in press conferences that any hospital in the United States should be able to treat Ebola.

CNN asked Frieden if he regretted those statements, considering that at Texas Presbyterian Hospital, Duncan died and two nurses became infected, but the other nine U.S. Ebola patients, who were treated at hospitals that were specially designated to treat the disease, all lived. In those cases no workers became infected.

 

"Clearly there are things that we wish we'd done differently," he said. "The bottom line is that Ebola is hard to treat, and when the first patient ever with Ebola came to the United States, we thought the guidelines would protect the health care workers. When two health care workers became infected, we recognized the guidelines didn't work. So we changed them."

Riiiiiiiiiiight. The only thing you do, as an agency with no coercive power, is to promote standards and guidelines for all 5000 hospitals in the US on anything that could be a public health concern. Particularly a virus with no known cure and an 80% mortality rate. So the only thing you had to contribute on Ebola, you totally fucked up nine ways from Sunday, and had to completely backtrack on and revamp, because you'd never noticed the work done for decades by groups like Doctors Without Borders in dealing with this very disease much better under far more primitive conditions. Great job, Tommy!

He added that one thing his agency would have done differently would have been to tell nurse Amber Vinson not to board an airplane from Cleveland to Dallas. Vinson had taken care of Duncan and had reported a temperature of 99.5 degrees, but was told she could fly, because the CDC's threshold at that time for Ebola was 100.4 degrees. Vinson later was diagnosed with Ebola.

Because when your main goal is the public's inviolable health and safety, what better bureaucratic approach than to throw all caution to the winds, and stick lockstep with inappropriate and clueless guidelines, right?

CNN also asked if he considered leaving his post when several Republican lawmakers called for his resignation.

"I'm really just focused on stopping Ebola. I'm working around the clock to do that, and I will continue to do that, as long as Ebola is spreading, as long as I have the opportunity to do that," he said.

Based on your performance in this crisis so far, you "working around the clock" on it is pretty much every American's worst nightmare. Consider other opportunities, and update your resume. There's got to be a town somewhere in North Dakota or the Yukon that needs a good dog and cat vet where the locals may not associate you with the CDC gig right off the bat. Think hard on this, will ya?

"I wish I had know then what we know now," he added. "But that's not how the world works. We live life forwards and we understand it backwards. Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, there are always things we would do differently."

Like wishing the president had hired someone who wasn't a flaming head-up-the-ass hemorrhoid to supervise the CDC, no doubt. Or, simply playing calliope music as the background music whenever you make an interview appearance. Like this time.

And now, some appropriate exit music for you...

Ebola Update 11/10

The latest WHO numbers are up on Wiki: Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone are now "officially" reporting 20, 35, and 60+ (respectively) new cases/day over the last 8 days.
So call it 100+ new victims, daily, or more every week than the worldwide total in the beginning of July - when this brushfire was already totally out of control.

The only thing we know from that is that people aren't going to the Ebola treatment centers, which isn't at all the same thing as saying that people aren't spreading the disease. The chickens there seem to have realized that the centers don't "treat" anything, they merely remove one from their family and friends to die alone, and they seem to be averse to that mode of government-run healthcare.
Which explains why the disease is exploding in Sierra Leone now, and will be shortly in Liberia (if it isn't already) in 10-21 days. As the number of native inhabitants in either country who can count (in a way the phrase is used in Western civilization) is something around 35%, whether we'll know beforehand is anyone's guess.

FYI, subtracting the known dead and presumed survivors from the current case count, and looking at the available bed count, leads to the inescapable conclusion that there are at least 4000-5000 known EVD victims still walking around in those three societies every day.
This is not a recipe for any sort of optimism.

---
NYTimes confirms that Dr. Doofus will be released shortly, Ebola-free, with no further US cases active at the moment.

---

In a Romper Room update, MiMi Crybaby and her sidekick Mangina plan to flee their former home precincts, because apparently they've been mentally scarred for life by the unconscionable response of the local Maine rural denizens to having someone with the professional ethics of the spiritual love child of Bill Clinton and Typhoid Mary living amongst them. Reportedly, certain suggestions and anonymous messages have made continued residence there a less-than-pleasant thing to contemplate. Boo frickin' hoo.

This decision tree was apparently not helped by the local college of nursing throwing Mangina out on his ass in the meantime. Perhaps he can find a better career fit in either the retail clerical or custodial/janitorial fields of occupational endeavor. (One suspects UT-Arlington will probably start quietly excising Mimi's graduate bio splash pages rather circumspectly in future days as well. "We train bigger jackholes" is probably not a good recruiting strategy in Texas, or anywhere else.)

Best of luck to those two, as any place they land will probably not take to them any better, from Georgetown D.C. to Timbuktu. But here's hoping Mangina gets a vasectomy before they manage to breed any more selfish little whiny bastards. Even the CDC is oversubscribed in that respect.

---

And now, the media have taken to reporting the end of quarantines a week in advance:

(Reuters) - Mali is preparing to release 108 people from Ebola quarantine in a tentative step toward declaring it has contained an outbreak.Mali became the sixth West African country to report a case of Ebola when a 2-year-old girl died last month, leading to an urgent search for anyone who may have been infected during her 1,200-km bus trip from Guinea to the Malian town of Kayes.
The Malian Ministry of Health is expected to confirm later on Monday that 29 people who may have had contact with her during a two-hour stopover in Bamako, along with 12 people in Kayes, can be released from a 21-day quarantine on Tuesday.
A further 67 contacts, including three relatives who traveled with her and 33 healthcare workers, are due to be given the all clear on Saturday.

While we're happy if Mali manages to stop Ebola faster than potato chips, at just one, this news story now leads to the inescapable conclusion about this whole story phenomenon, exactly as noted before hereabouts:

The Seven stages of Ebola Reporting:

1. What Ebola?
2. EBOLA! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!
3. Don't Worry, the Government has TOP. MEN. on the case.
4. The TOP. MEN. Are Idiots! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!
5. Ebola is killing everyone handy in droves, but they're mostly "just Africans".
6. Continued Ebola Stories upset the editorial bias and the entrenched bureaucracy.
7. What Ebola?

Don't worry though. Just like with future terrorism incidents, our first line of defense is the crack minions of vigilance at the TSA.

Duncan v2.0? Ha!
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?(tm)

 

Calling Captain Obvious!

STOP THE PRESSES! WaPo SAYS AIRPORT SCREENINGS ARE WORTHLESS!

The debate over whether the Obama administration should ban flights from Ebola-stricken nations has been raging for weeks, fueled by fears of an outbreak in the United States and a lot of election-inspired finger pointing.
The Department of Homeland Security last week imposed new travel restrictions for anyone arriving from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, requiring those passengers to come through one of five major U.S. airports in Atlanta, Chicago, New Jersey, New York and Virginia.
Those travelers now have to submit to temperature checks and questioning. But scientific studies published by the National Institutes of Health have shown that similar protocols were largely ineffective during an outbreak of Swine Flu in 2009. 

The Department of Homeland Security requires temperature checks of air passengers arriving from Ebola-ravaged nations, but studies have determined that the method is largely ineffective at detecting individuals who are infected. Temperature checks didn’t work for Liberian Thomas Eric Duncan, who died from Ebola this month after arriving in Dallas. Duncan did not have a fever when he landed in Texas on Sept. 28, and he said he had not been in contact with Ebola patients in his native country, although that later proved to be a false statement.
The Australian study concluded that officials should consider “more effective interventions, such as contact tracing in the community.” The findings are in line with what federal officials have said: That the best way to prevent Ebola from spreading is to identify everyone whom infected individuals have contacted.

In other news, water is wet, it gets dark just after sunset, and politicians lie to us. 

Oopsie! Pres. Obola's Sticky Fingerprints Found

h/t WRSA and Daily Caller
I'm shocked! Shocked, I say, to find out a FEDERAL EMPLOYEE of the CDC is being used to browbeat state perogatives to protect public health, and advance the White house's case in full stealth mode:

Ebola health care worker Kaci Hickox, who was released from quarantine with the support of the White House, is a Centers For Disease Control and Prevention employee, records reveal. The lawyer who helped earn her release is a recent White House state dinner guest.Hickox was released from Ebola quarantine in Newark, N.J., Monday afternoon after the White House pressured New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to release the nurse that was working in Sierra Leone with Doctors Without Borders. Hickox’s case for release was also bolstered by New York civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, who took on Hickox’s case.

Here’s an overlooked factor that could have contributed to her White House-backed release: Hickox is an official CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) officer who performed work for the CDC in recent months.
Hickox was a Class of 2012 member of CDC’s two-year EIS officer training program, according to the official program for CDC’s 2014 EIS Conference (p. 98), which was held from April 28 to May 1, 2014. Hickox was featured in a photograph in the program.
Hickox was listed as an “EIS officer” for the CDC in program materials for a CDC course she taught in July 2014. She was specifically listed as an active “EIS officer” as recently as July 18, 2014, according to CDC documents.

In Crybaby's case, that means her normal gig isn't caring for anyone; she performs a clerical function for the .gov during outbreak data collection. She is thus about as vital to the actual treatment of disease in that role as teats on a bull. Which also explains her tenuous attachment to the common sense realities of outbreak nursing. She's what military people refer to as a clipboard commando.
Whether she did that, or actual patient care nursing in Africa is an open question.
So she's not some poor, down-trodden oppressed worker whose "civil rights" have been violated. She's a federal government employee, who knows precisely the impact of the state directives and oversight she's challenging, with the help and support of long-time government operatives, and doubtless the direction and assistance of the White House. Which explains why Pres. Obola, unlike his photo op hug of recovered nurse Nina Pham, has no plans to come within a country mile of Nurse Crybaby: someone might ask about the direct connection, since he's ultimately her boss.

Pres. Barack Obama was in Maine on Thursday to campaign for Democrats, including the one trying to unseat LePage next week. A spokesman knew of no plans for Obama and LePage to meet. The president had no plans to meet Hickox.

Well done, @$$clowns, you're disregard for the "science" and total lack of concern for the rights and safety of the citizens of Maine, New Jersey, and any other state, are now a matter of public record.

And the same jackass who told you "Ebola is highly unlikely to come here" and "Any hospital can handle Ebola patients" and "We have long-standing protocols in place" and about 200 other lies, half-truths, and gross distortions, is her boss.

 

Thanks, Tom Frieden, and welcome back to the limelight. it's been almost a week since you've been caught stepping on your dick in public, so we were wondering where you'd gotten and what you were up to. Now we know.

Welcome To Oppositeville

Things here are a little different from what you may be used to.

In Oppositeville, Ebola is hard to catch.
But one tiny "break in protocol" and you can catch it.
In Oppositeville, you can't catch Ebola on the bus.
But healthcare workers exposed to it shouldn't ride public transport.
In Oppositeville, people on the same plane as an Ebola victim are at "almost no risk" of getting the disease.
But the person who had it "shouldn't have flown".
In Oppositeville, shutting down flights from West Africa is "not on the table".
Putting exposed persons on the "No Fly" list is.
In Oppositeville, there's no need to send troops to the border.
But plenty of need to send them 5000 miles away amidst a deadly plague.
"Any hospital" in Oppositeville can care for Ebola patients.
And then that patient dies, and the infection is doubled in exactly three weeks.
In Oppositeville, the treatment protocols are always perfect.
And when they're followed, people get infected anyway.
In Oppositeville, the guidelines are tested and flawless.
Until they're actually tested, and so flawed they're immediately all changed.
In Oppositeville, "we know how to control Ebola".
We just don't know how to get that information out to anyone.
In Oppositeville, we spend $10B for biohazard emergency preparedness.
But the hospitals don't actually buy any $5 hazmat suits to use.
In Oppositeville, we spend $100K to clean up an infected apartment.
But no one knows what to do with the hazmat in the ICU.
In Oppositeville, the hospitals are on Ebola training like a laser beam.
Starting with making Ebola training optional.
In Oppositeville, safety of staff, patients, and the community is their highest priority.
Actually showing their staffs what to do is their 5,297th priority.
In Oppositeville, it's such a crisis when a man gets into the White House that the head of the Secret Service resigns.
But when a man walks into the nearest ER, and exposes hundreds of Americans to his deadly isease, it's nobody's fault, and no one has to resign.
In Oppositeville, a dozen or so CDC investigators can track down hundreds and thousands of Ebola contacts within days.
But thousands of ICE agents can't find or deport 11M illegal aliens in 20 years.
In Oppositeville, we can't get one Marine out of Mexico, right next door, after 6 months.
But we can get 500 of them into Liberia, on the other side of the world, in 6 days.
In Oppositeville, we can't build an oil pipeline that would help the economies of Canada, our largest trading partner, and those of six U.S. states.
But we can keep the air pipeline going to save the economies of Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, even though the main thing they bring us is infected Ebola patients.

This is the mayor of Oppositeville:

This is his chief medical advisor:

This is the newest benefit of Obamacare:

And this is what they're planning to bring us next:

 

You might want to consider moving to Realityville.

Your call.

ITOLDYOUSOITOLDYOUSOITOLDYOUSO - UPDATED

Surprising no one with a brain, and thus everyone at CDC and most any media outlet, it turns out that No one in any capacity at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital was prepared or equipped, physically or mentally, to properly and adequately deal with and treat Ebola patient Thomas Duncan, not even on the SECOND time he entered that facility for care.

JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER HOSPITAL IN THE US FROM MAINE TO MOLOKAI, OR KEY WEST TO KENAI.

(CNN) -- The Texas hospital where a nurse contracted Ebola while caring for a patient had guidelines that were "constantly changing" and didn't have protocols on how to deal with the deadly virus," a nurses' union claims.

"The protocols that should have been in place in Dallas were not in place, and that those protocols are not in place anywhere in the United States as far as we can tell," National Nurses United Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro said Tuesday night. "We're deeply alarmed."

Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas treated Thomas Eric Duncan before his death from Ebola last week. Nurse Nina Pham, who cared for him, is being treated for the virus.

CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta said the claims, if true, are "startling." He said some of them could be "important when it comes to possible other infections."

Officials from National Nurses United declined to specify how many nurses they had spoken with, nor identify them to to protect them from possible retaliation. The nurses at the hospital are not members of a union, officials said.

Here's a look at some of the allegations the nurses made, according to the union:

Claim: Duncan wasn't immediately isolated

On the day that Duncan was admitted to the hospital with possible Ebola symptoms, he was "left for several hours, not in isolation, in an area where other patients were present," union co-president Deborah Burger said.

Up to seven other patients were present in that area, the nurses said, according to the union.

A nursing supervisor faced resistance from hospital authorities when the supervisor demanded that Duncan be moved to an isolation unit, the nurses said, according to the union.

Claim: The nurses' protective gear left their necks exposed

After expressing concerns that their necks were exposed even as they wore protective gear, the nurses were told to wrap their necks with medical tape, the union says.

"They were told to use medical tape and had to use four to five pieces of medical tape wound around their neck. The nurses have expressed a lot of concern about how difficult it is to remove the tape from their neck," Burger said.

Claim: At one point, hazardous waste piled up

"There was no one to pick up hazardous waste as it piled to the ceiling," Burger said. "They did not have access to proper supplies."

Claim: Nurses got no "hands-on" training

"There was no mandate for nurses to attend training," Burger said, though they did receive an e-mail about a hospital seminar on Ebola.

"This was treated like hundreds of other seminars that were routinely offered to staff," she said.

Claim: The nurses "feel unsupported"

So why did the group of nurses -- the union wouldn't say how many -- contact the nursing union, which they don't belong to?

According to DeMoro, the nurses were upset after authorities appeared to blame nurse Pham, who has contracted Ebola, for not following protocols.

"This nurse was being blamed for not following protocols that did not exist. ... The nurses in that hospital were very angry, and they decided to contact us," DeMoro said.

And they're worried conditions at the hospital "may lead to infection of other nurses and patients," Burger said.

A hospital spokesman did not respond to the specific allegations, but said patient and employee safety is the hospital's top priority.

"We take compliance very seriously. We have numerous measures in place to provide a safe working environment, including mandatory annual training and a 24-7 hotline and other mechanisms that allow for anonymous reporting," hospital spokesman Wendell Watson said.

The Dallas mayor declined to comment on the accusations against the hospital.

"I don't comment on anonymous allegations," Mike Rawlings said.

But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a statement following the union's claims.

"For health care workers in Dallas and elsewhere, the Ebola situation is extremely difficult," CDC spokeman Tom Skinner wrote.

"The CDC is committed to their safety, and we'll continue to do everything possible to make sure they have what they need so they can prepare to safely manage Ebola patients."

There was no protocol in place.
There IS NO PROTOCOL IN PLACE.
They made shit up as they went along, every day.
They exposed staff, other patients, and anyone nearby to a deadly disease because of incompetence, no planning, no training, and flagrant disregard for everything but their bottom line.
Equipment, basic supplies, and routine infrastructure was utterly lacking, and totally inappropriate to manage so much as ONE Ebola patient safely or successfully.
They ignored staff concerns, and resisted common sense suggestions on the spot.
They're falling back on "annual CYA training" to paper over their reckless disregard for common sense and everyone's safety.
They threw front-line staff under the bus at the first opportunity, both figuratively, and by letting them be exposed to a deadly pathogen.
The other authorities within whose purview the hospital functions have their heads up their asses, and continue to spout happygas platitudes, while refusing to step in, lop off heads, and fix the problems RIGHT FUCKING NOW.
They're STILL NOT READY TO DEAL WITH EBOLA, IN ANY WAY, ANYWHERE.

I take no joy in Dallas getting exactly the people they deserve, from hospital administrators to the mayor, because the situation is no different in any and every city in America right now. Including yours.

And the lack of preparedness, the cavalier disregard of common sense, the blatant stupidity, the blind allegiance to and faith in their own non-existent competence and intelligence, have exposed Americans to Ebola, infected Americans to Ebola, and will, in all likelihood, kill Americans with Ebola, just as if they put a bullet in their heads with their own hands.

Pitchfork, torches, and a noose, motherfuckers. Right now, across the board.
And no, I don't mean metaphorically.

If I lived in Dallas, I'd be building a goddamned scaffold across the street from THP, and I'd have WANTED:MURDER posters with pictures of the mayor, the heads of the county heath and state health departments, and the hospital officers, going up on every wall and pole in that city, right now.

The CDC (and the lifelong asstards at the Joint Commission) , nominally responsible for ensuring that hospitals have their infectious disease crap together, deserve their own scaffold in D.C.

And it's still not too late. Because for some mistakes, "Sorry" just doesn't cut it.

Now does anyone not understand that if their lips are moving, they're lying to you?
And have been since this outbreak started?



UPDATE: THP Nurse Today Show exclusive interview
No prior Ebola discussions
No prior training
Infectious Disease specialists called: 
"We don't know [what you should do.] We'll have to call you back."
Nurses caring for Duncan + other patients at same time
Duncan placed in non-isolated ER area near other exposed patients
Inadequate protective gear
No disinfection for doctors moving from Duncan to other patients, and told by Infectious Disease staff that was okay
Isolation patient handling protocols changing daily
Nurses were lied to by supervisory staff
Infectious Ebola materials left exposed in common areas of hospital where everyone was walking by - staff, patients, and visitors
Nurse in interview concerned about hospital reprisals for speaking out publicly

Synchronicity

As the Ebola outbreak has made obvious to anyone, we live in a very interconnected world. Nothing happens anywhere without the potential to drastically affect people far removed. This isn't just true in terms of physical space, it's true in all sorts of ways.

When you pedal a bicycle, say a one-speed beach cruiser, whatever the ratio of pedal rotations to tire turns is all there is. If it takes two trips of your feet to turn the tires one rev, that's it, and if you want to go faster, you have to pedal faster. A ten- or twelve-speed bike can get you to where one trip for your feet translates to multiple turns for the big wheels on the bike, but there are still only two gears involved.

So what?
Well, for Ebola, look at a how many gears are in play.

Ebola is contagious, virulent, and lethal.
Okay, so don't play with Ebola.
And the population it shows up in is illiterate and superstition-driven.
Okay, worse.
And their leaders are both corrupt and incompetent.
Yikes.
And they're the ones in charge of nipping the repeated outbreaks in the bud.
Not good.
And their countries are impoverished.
Really not good.
And our government isn't that bright either.
Downright horrible.
Even demonstrably maliciously incompetent.
Stop!
But they think they're jetfuel geniuses with magic wands.
Really, STOP!
And we have airplanes coming from there to here, daily, 7 months into this latest outbreak, which has predictably spiraled beyond the worst of every other outbreak combined.
STOP NOW!
And our government thinks that our healthcare system is prepared, apparently in the main because we have indoor plumbing.
Why are you still talking to me?!?
But in fact they're totally untrained, unequipped, and not even thinking about this in most of the country, and haven't for 40 years despite numerous sentinel events.
I'm ignoring you now!
And the civil authorities on city, county, and state levels are even less well-prepared than the medical ones, and even more maliciously incompetent than the feds.
La-La-La-La-La-I-Can't-Heeeeaaaarrrr-You!
And the media is too busy buffing the government's knob and repeating the local authorities platitudes to care, and too stupid to notice.
Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!
It's just as bad with every other government on the planet.
Please, Mommy, make the bad man stop!
Have I mentioned that we've essentially stopped all border and immigration enforcement for months leading up to this current crisis?
Waaah!Waaaaaahhhhhh!WAAAAHHHHHHHH!
Should I mention that they think they've solved the whole Islamic terrorists who want to kill us all Problem, and think it doesn't exist any more?
Uncle! Uncle! I give up! Please, no more!!!
How about noting that their previous forays into government healthcare have been forcing computer charting, designing ObamaCare, making the website for it, and running the VA?
Where is the International Red Cross? This is torture worse than waterboarding!!
That's synchronicity, for this particular problem.

One turn of the outbreak pedal, like Thomas Duncan, gets you chaos, panic, and disorder, which is then answered by claims that everything is fine, when it's clearly not.

Like skydiving with two already-shattered femurs, this isn't going to end well.

Every gear on this thing speeds up the wheels, which increases the impact, meaning more bad things happen faster, harder, and with greater damage effects. And the response from the people nominally in charge of fixing things is always to pedal faster.

Because when banging your head into a stone wall doesn't work at all, what you really want to do is load yourself into a cannon and light the fuse.

And we all know what's pulling into the center ring after that:

 

More government "help".

To fix the problems they created in the first place.

Because that's worked out so well for us so far.

 

If you like your epidemic, you can keep your epidemic.

Dear 70 IQ Meatpuppets: Your Ride Is Here

In any emergency involving more than zero persons, the driving force determining the duration and severity of the emergency will quickly become the IQ and common sense of the stupidest person(s) in the group. Also their level of preparedness, and the global group wisdom of whatever entity or agency may have been responsible for preparing them (or failing miserably to do so) to cope with such emergency.

This is why the castaways have spent three seasons in prime time and 45 years in syndication, on Gilligan's Island.

It's why Thomas Duncan got to the United States.

It's why Madrid currently has an ongoing Ebola problem.

And today, it's why Officer Safety, in Dallas, is at risk to be the next Texan to die a horrible and totally preventable death inside about two weeks, unless he's very, very fortunate.
(And true to form, Dallas health official fucktards continue to do what fucktards do best, insisting that the deputy can't have Ebola because he wasn't exposed to the guy who wasn't there, ignoring that the entire apartment he was in unprotected was so contaminated that it had to be decontaminated days later. Notice they didn't say "He can't have Ebola because we've tested him, and the tests are completely negative for 3 weeks". Nor that "We think the risk is low, but he was definitely exposed to the contagion, so we'll monitor him for 21 days, and hope for the best." But that because they say so, this can't be Ebola, because "smarter than basic principles of epidemiology". You can't make stuff up that's as surreal as the daily behavior of people in charge in Dallas. I have to ask: do y'all just elect people there with the lowest IQs, or is it just a lucky serendipity that that's who you have in apparently every position of importance on this case?)

If he is infected, it's also why he probably won't be the last one there to be so.

On a human level, if this turns out poorly, I'm sorry for him and his family, and I'm sure he's a nice guy and great fun at parties.

Unfortunately, Ebola didn't get that memo, and it can't read.

Ebola will not "Respect Your Authoritay!" just because you have a badge.
Ebola will not stop because you're cute, or have a banging body or a killer smile.
Ebola will not stop because you like puppies and kittens.
Ebola will not stop because of any countless number of asinine reasons you, whoever you are, think it should magically want to go and jack somebody else up, if you're one of the troglodyte halfwit continuation school mouthbreathing utterly clueless morons.

THIS

   stops Ebola.

Got PPE on? EVERY TIME? BEFORE you risk exposure??

NO?!?
No problem.

You'll get Ebola instead. And then, in +/- 12 days, you'll die in a puddle of your own bloody guts as you vomit and shit them out both ends, because you were ignorant, stupid, uninformed, lied to, gullible, lazy, careless, clueless, depravedly indifferent, and just generally a waste of skin and oxygen on the cosmic balance sheet of the Universe.
And Mother Nature has red-carded you out of the game, and out of the gene pool, forevermore.
The Universe doesn't give a damn about that, and for the most part neither do I, since I don't know you.
But you're going to take out people all around you, and eventually, you'll get to someone I do care about, and for that bout of serial killing, there isn't a circle of Hell low enough to give you what you deserve for what you're wreaking upon the rest of the population every time you come up to bat.

So to the jackasses at the State Department and the White House who think, despite your rosy good wishes, that checking asymptomatic people is helping, and that transporting bushels of potentially infectious people here 24/7 is a good idea;
to the clueless bastards in Dallas who pressure-washed infectious hazmat Ebola vomit into an entire community,
who put an entire family in a plague house for six days,
who sent a paramedic team and ambulance back onto the streets for 48 hours after transporting a known Ebola patient with no decon,
thus exposing further patients on subsequent ambulance trips for two more days, 
who sent a three man sheriff's team unprotected into that same plague house,
which team was stupid enough to walk in the door despite such silly-ass criminally negligent orders,
whose "judges" wandered in and sat with the exposed family in the contaminated quarters in their street clothes, then wore the same infected garments back to the office, and home to their family, after a nice snuggly meet-and-greet with hordes of similarly clueless reporters;
to the incredibly brain-deprived shit-for-brains Infection Control "specialists" at hundreds to thousands of hospitals who think they can handle Ebola with "Standard precautions", and keep peddling that utter bullshit to staffs who have to weigh your jackassery against the need for a paycheck to feed and shelter their families;
to the idiots in Spain who showed all the competence of the Dallas authorities;
and to the hundreds of thoroughly heads-up-your-asses-because-the-sun-shines-out-of-Obama's-bellybutton reporters, news hairdos, and editor/producers;
stop driving the Ebola Retard Bus, because you're KILLING US, Smalls.

No, not figuratively, LITERALLY, you flaming dumbshits.

And I swear to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, if this thing gets unleashed and goes hog-wild, and gets to the populace at large, before we go, we'll hunt you all down, and set you on fire,  to watch you dance and listen to your final screams, just to make us feel a little bit better in our last days on earth.

And that's the only thing you can look forward to in this entire outbreak that's going to make me smile.

Bummer for you though.

One other thing, illustrative of the point:
The new phone books are out.
The new numbers:
8,033 total cases, 3,865 dead, as of Oct. 5th. Spain has been added to the tally board, but they haven't yet updated it with their case, nor Duncan's death, nor the new Dallas case. But they will.

Sierra Leone's death toll has surged upward with their recent come-to-Jesus revelations, adding more deaths in the last 4 days than the total they've recorded in the entire previous seven weeks.
Given their laxity and mendacious prior casualty and infection reporting, it's prudent to assume they have unreported (hence un-contact-traced) cases numbering into the thousands. Nothing less would support so many new dead, so rapidly.
They had more deaths over the same period than Liberia, which has nearly double the reported cases of Sierra Leone.
Why? Reflect on the fact that this is also the period exactly 10-15 days after their vaunted "nationwide 3-day quarantine" in late September, keeping everyone locked up inside their homes uninfected alongside the infected.

Then flash forward to the fact that we did the exact same sort of quarantine in Dallas for six days, from Sept. 28th to Oct. 4th, with the other members of the Duncan family, locking the uninfected inside known contagious facilities.

Brilliant!
So the Dallas city government is demonstrably twice as smart as the government of Sierra Leone.
Walk tall, Texas.

Hopefully, Dallas hardware stores will soon experience a run on pitchforks and scythes, and residents will stage a torchlight visit to some local leading citizens. Or at least take some hot tar and chicken feathers, and a rail.

 

 

 

 

What's Coming Next

So, over a few short months, I've gone from being one of the few talking about this (even on medical-related blogs, who should have known better) and way out ahead of the crowd, to being right first, to being just one of hundreds of sites and links, all tripping over the same stories (except for medical-related blogs, who should know better). The prospect of a horrible death apparently concentrates peoples' minds wonderfully. But at least people are paying attention now, which was the object of the exercise.

So the new question is, What next?

1) Ebola isn't going away in Africa anytime soon.
When I first started posting in forums, and then blogging the posts here, Ebola was at 1000 cases, and 600 or so deaths.
As of 1 October, it's nearly 7500 cases and 3500 deaths, and those are the "official" (i.e. total horseshit) numbers coming out of W. Africa, the most backwards, illiterate, corrupt hellhole on the planet nine years out of any ten, forever. The CDC was guesstimating the reality numbers may be 2.5 times higher. Only this week, Sierra Leone, whose numbers have been hanging fairly small since Liberia started driving the bus in this outbreak, announced 120+ deaths in one day. Those people didn't get sick and die overnight; they were clearly infected 3-5 weeks prior. And that one day jump took the death toll there beyond what it is in Liberia, with has 3-4 times as many infected victims. Conclusion: things there are 3-4 times higher and worse than official numbers, and probably the same for Guinea and Liberia as well.

2)  Outside help isn't accomplishing anything fast enough, and likely never will.
As already noted, because there are 3000 more dead bodies (again, "officially"), and 4000 more sick patients, in countries that were more than 2000 beds short back in late September. And we've built exactly nothing since then. Supplies sit untouched on harbor docks, because the local kleptocrats haven't had their palms greased to let them in. And no one new has been trained to staff any imaginary new care centers even if we'd built so much as one. In fact, more doctors have been evacuated back to the countries of origin, infected with Ebola, even as the patient load doubles roughly every three weeks.

Therefore:

3) The people and governments are going to be more desperate, and closer to panic and collapse, rather than less so, over time.
Duncan took a powder, and lied his way through screenings, when Liberia had but 3000 total cases. It's past 4000 now. By the end of the month, they'll have 6000 cases, and likely 12,000 before Thanksgiving. Draw your own conclusions on how much calmer the populace will be then, and how much stronger and competent the respective governments will be.
Every day, more and more people there will realize the end position on this epidemic there, and they will rush the lifeboats: more frequently, and more desperately. And the so-called guardians at the ports of exit now are illiterate peasants baffled by the complexities of a drugstore thermometer, with a long and colorful history of taking care of those with the most cash, starting with themselves, when things get sporty. Everybody cheerfully assumes that Duncan only lied to get out; when in fact, the historical odds are, he also slipped somebody a Benjamin (or there, a sawbuck), and his "exit visa" was magically provided and approved.
That's how business is transacted at most borders at most times since forever.

4) Numbers One, Two, and Three, lead inexorably to Number Four: Duncan was merely the FIRST Ebola patient we'll be getting (as long as the jacktards in charge keep the pipeline open), rather than the LAST.
Duncan's problems are over, and even the 50 people in Dallas sweating bullets until the 20th aren't the major concern.
The problem is the next 1, or 5, or 20 Duncans who get off of planes in NYC, DC, Boston, Miami, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, etc. Not if, but when, exactly as the CDC told every hospital in the country two weeks before Duncan walked into Texas Health Presbyterian, and started the party.
Flight crews on commercial airplanes are no better trained nor equipped, the "screenings", there, here, or anywhere, will do little to catch infected people, and nothing at all to stop those like Duncan in the latent incubation stage of Ebola.
Like TSA screenings of your shoes and cavity searches for underwear bombs, it's kabuki theatre to simulate action, with no real effect.
Hospitals are mostly no better off, and will respond, each time, exactly as THP did: poorly, clumsily, and while endangering the health of everyone concerned.
Everybody has to burn their hand on the stove before they really get what "hot" means.
So our troubles aren't over on Oct. 20th, or whenever the last Duncan-related contact passes from quarantine isolation precautions. They've just begun, until the last patient anywhere in the world passes out of quarantine.
And that will be like earthquakes: Only until the next time.

5) All of this completely ignores the people who WANT to bring Ebola here.
Anybody willing to strap 40 pounds of Semtex and hardware parts to his chest, walk into a pizzeria or schoolyard, and be a not-so-smart bomb for Allah, will have no compunction whatsoever about deliberately infecting themselves with Ebola, waiting until they turn symptomatic, and then going for daily walks at malls, movie theatres, swap meets, shows, conventions, amusement parks, sports events, concerts, or just ride all day on a commuter train, and anything else they can manage, and lying about all their contacts and visits after they collapse, because 72 virgins. That's just how they roll.
The gist of the entire asinine "Ebola isn't that big a deal" mindset depends entirely on honest and accurate contact tracing from the infected. When those who bring it here don't give a damn about helping, and actually lie about their whereabouts, it's too late for some governmental jackass Inspector Clousseau to slap his forehead and exclaim "Aha! We never thought of that clever gambit!!" (But that they will anyways is a good reason to bring back the rack, thumbscrews, hot pincers, and burning at the stake as part of the government bonus negative reinforcement plan for that sort of official stupidity.)

6) One through Five inclusive lead to a high likelihood that somewhere, sometime, a city or larger locale will be stricken and overwhelmed by Ebola. Dallas could still get there if 5-10 of those contacts become symptomatic in rapid succession. The same would be true if a dozen or so cases cropped up anyplace. Imagine someone infecting 50-100 contacts, and then not conveniently calling the CDC to alert the Usual Suspects to get cracking. Like if they just sat in some little squalorous dive and quietly died, and nobody found them for a few days, by which point patients 2 through 20 all showed up with symptoms before anyone knew there was a Reference Patient. That city would be so far from screwed at that point it would be hard to see it from where they were. And it could be my town, or yours. Tracing 2000-10,000 contacts a week later is a total fantasy.
And don't even try selling me how the crack CDC/DHS/FEMA/.GOV juggernaut would leap into action to save the day.
They're the reason Duncan got here in the first place, and there's little the government ever does right, even on their best day. Anybody trying to sell you anything else is running for office, or lobbying for a government contract, either way, entirely at your expense.
If they do anything that helps, it will be secondarily, and accidentally, as a near-certainty.

7) YOYO: You're On You're Own.
You need to pay attention to the news, both to see what they're telling you, and what they're not. (The latter, as I've demonstrated on this blog lately, will always be the larger volume.) You need to make your own plan to take care of yourself, and your family/tribe/group if you have that. Ebola is not going to low-crawl up your driveway and butt-rape you in your sleep. (Somebody desperate for your belongings might, but you knew about that already, right? Right?) So you may, as a result of future outbreak(s), need to be able to come up with food, water, and other necessities of life (sanitation, power, heat, and so on) for an extended period of time. Three days gets you Jack, except a guarantee you're in a refugee camp on Day Four. Start with a month, absolute bare minimum. Work up in increments to six. (More than that still is better.) If you can't make another plan with that 6-month to Whatever cushion to do it in, you have bigger problems than Ebola. FYI, Ebola has been going on in W.Africa since last March, with no end in sight. Ponder what that could mean if you get caught inside a county or state quarantine here, next month or next year.

And for the love of anything holy, abandon any idea that you're going to stock up on hazmat suits, masks, goggles, gloves, etc. etc., as if you were going to daily venture out amidst the problem, or as if, in a quarantine, you being out on the street at all wouldn't be carte blanche for the local constables to throw a bag on you and put you in an Ebola Quarantine/Treatment Center, where if you didn't have it when you went in, circumstances would soon solve that problem for you.
Stay your ass home, period.
The only possible exception to that is if you have a relatively secluded place to go outside the big cities (As Remus says about weekly "Avoid crowds."), and you go there beforehand. Whether or when is up to you. Five days early is better than one hour too late, but it's entirely your decision. And you still have to provide yourself all the same necessities once you get there, just likelier in a much better starting position versus someone in a condo in Georgetown or Manhattan would be.

Read, think, plan, acquire. And STFU about it. You're not "hoarding", you're prudently preparing to not be part of the problem once there is one. Your fellow citizens in the EBT-card-toting Free Shit Army are the problem, and if they think you have something they want, they'll be your problem. Stay home, and keep your head down, and if there's an outbreak and local quarantine, stay in the house, read a book, and wait for it to burn itself out.

And please, sweet suffering Shiva, vote the current @$$clowns out of office. Not because of their party, but because they're idiots. We may be just exchanging @$$clowns, but no one could do a worse job than what we've got now, and there's always a chance it will help. You've got nothing to lose for trying. Government didn't create Ebola, they're just too incompetent to do the right things about it to not make it worse. Do what you can, where you are, with what you've got, so it doesn't get worse for you.
Government is all about selfishness. You be about self-preservation and self-reliance.

And I don't care if you're a rabid atheist: pray for a cure.

Things Fall Apart

 President and his CDC and policy advisors pose for picture after latest Ebola strategy meeting.

Doctors and nurses in Liberia flee hospitals:

A new and remarkably candid on-the-ground audit from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the Ebola crisis in Liberia said that doctors and nurses have fled hospitals in the infection zone and that obstacles to killing the virus remain.

 And the lack of medical staff seemed to surprise the report authors. “Before the epidemic, six physicians served all four counties. At the time of the evaluation, only three physicians remained; the others had left Liberia because of the epidemic. In two of four hospitals assessed, nursing staff members were not coming to work or had abandoned facilities; in another hospital, health care providers had not been paid for three months but were still providing basic care,” said the analysis.

Mission creep: We've gone from "none whatsoever" to "several dozen". Next stop: lots!

A few dozen U.S. troops will have exposure to laboratory samples from potential Ebola patients by running testing facilities in Liberia, the head of U.S. Africa Command said.
While most of the 4,000 troops authorized to deploy to the west African country won’t have direct exposure to the virus -- as Pentagon officials have previously emphasized -- three or four specially trained personnel will run each of as many as seven testing labs, Army General David Rodriguez said today at a Pentagon news conference.

Bear in mind that we don't have MOPP gear that's made for Ebola; our military stuff is intended for chemical agents far more than for dealing with oozing blood, or bloody vomit and feces:

The JSLIST can be worn in a contaminated environment for 24 hours. In addition, JSLIST users must keep track of how long the JSLIST suit has been out of its original packaging bag, and how many times it has been washed. The limit for wearing the suit is 45 days total and the limit for washing it is six times. Once the suit is taken out of its bag, it's good for a maximum of 120 days. After any of these limits have been reached, the JSLIST suit is good only for training. Such overlimit suits are turned in and FOR TRAINING ONLY is stenciled on the outer surface.

The suits are also hot as hell, and we're talking about equatorial Africa here.

Ten days ago, Ebola getting to the US was "unlikely".
They keep using that word; I do not think it means what they think it means:

The Ebola virus becoming airborne is a possible but unlikely outcome in the current epidemic, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Tom Frieden said Tuesday.  

A change in the way Ebola spreads would make the virus significantly more dangerous. The disease kills roughly half  90% of the people it infects, and lacking a vaccine or cure, its traceable chain of transmission through bodily fluids is one reason officials believe they can contain it.

Top. Men.

ATLANTA (CBS Atlanta/AP) — CNN senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen said she was shocked and horrified at the lack of screening for Ebola at an Atlanta airport after coming back from Liberia.
Speaking to HLN on Monday, Cohen described what happened when she was going through customs at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
“I expected that they were going to take my temperature, they were going to ask me lots of questions, but they didn’t,” Cohen said.
Cohen explained she told the airport official that she just came back from Liberia covering the Ebola outbreak.
“I said, ‘I’m a journalist. I’ve come back from Liberia, I was covering Ebola.’ And the gentleman who was helping me – the officer – he started to hand my passport back and said, ‘Welcome home,’ but instead said, ‘Wait a second, I got an email about passengers like you. Hold on a second.’”
Cohen continued: “And he went and conferred with someone and he didn’t know and they conferred with someone else. And in the end he said, ‘You need to watch yourself for signs of Ebola.’ And I said, ‘Well, what am I watching out for?’ and he couldn’t tell me.”
Cohen’s producer and photojournalist were also not told of the signs to check for.
“I was travelling with two colleagues – a photojournalist and a producer – and they weren’t told anything and they also said they were journalists who had been covering Ebola,” Cohen told HLN. “So we were all kind of shocked and pretty horrified at the lack of screening in U.S. airports.”

So by all means, let's keep throwing gasoline on the fire!

The spread of Ebola across Europe is "quite unavoidable", the World Health Organisation has warned as four people were in hospital after a Spanish nursing assistant became the first person known to have contracted the virus outside Africa.WHO European director Zsuzsanna Jakab has said more cases will spread in Europe.

"It is quite unavoidable ... that such incidents will happen in the future because of the  extensive travel both from Europe to the affected countries and the other way around," she said. 

Gotcha. The house is on fire, but blasting it with water is right out of the question.

And lastly, even the WaPo Opinion section can no longer stave off the obvious logic of shutting off the air pipeline to Ebola Central, as I hinted directly and explicitly to that very WaPo the logic for here and fully advocated here, several days beforehand. Welcome to the party, guys.

Now if only someone can throw an armlock on the serial fabulist in the White House, and overcome his boundless supply of malice and incompetence to wring out of him one stray intelligent thought, before his kakistocracy kills us all.