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Comment by natrius | Hacker News Reader

If Ebola sticks with its current mode of transmission, stopping it is straightforward. Isolate patients, find their recent contacts, isolate them. Rinse[1] and repeat. It's easy to track down contacts in the western world: credit cards, post-paid mobile phones, formal employment, etc. It's hard to do so in developing world slums.

The entire developing world might be incapacitated by the Ebola epidemic. The western world, not so much.

[1] with bleach

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This is what Ive been saying all along. First world countries are fine...ATM.

However, the more people that are infected, the more chance of Ebola mutating some novel route of infection.

I.e. in the worst case....airborne.

Then it becomes a serious issue in the first world. An apocalyptic issue...

How do you track all the contacts from a million infected people?

There are no infected people in the USA. If there is a case here you ferociously follow the contacts of the first case(s).

The NSA has already shown this to be relatively trivial. Don't think for a second the government wouldn't harness that knowledge in an emergency situation such as an Ebola outbreak within the US.

The NSA is excellent at tracking communication contacts that establish the existence of relationships (notwithstanding the potential of false positives). And this would also work for tracking someone driving around in a car running errands in specific places.

But if someone arrives in a US city unwittingly carrying Ebola and gets on a crowded bus or subway car, that's not so easy to track. Likewise if the person goes to a nightclub or other crowded place. Suppose it's a returning American who attends a baseball or football game - the NSA may well be able to ID almost everyone who attended the event, but trying to screen/isolate tens of thousands of people who might have come in contact with an infected individual wandering around a stadium is easier said than done.

Crowded places aren't currently a significant source of Ebola infections.

That could change in short order - don't you remember the Liberian guy who turned up in Lagos? If he had traveled a few days earlier he would still have been infectious but might not have been identified as such on arrival.

http://news.yahoo.com/liberian-ebola-symptoms-dies-nigeria-o...

They can track your location via a cell phone that nearly everyone carry's with them at all times.

If an infection does come over, then expect people the laud the NSA's spying because it'll be the thing that makes it possible to identify, target, and quarantine.

I like the way you think--what a wonderful opportunity this presents for these agencies to justify their existence and methods!

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