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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

The CDC's communication to the public about Ebola has been extremely one-sided: they seem to only care about reducing the likelihood of panic, to the point where they spread lies and falsehoods that will eventually cause panic! As the article says, the audacity of saying "At this point there is zero risk of transmission on the flight" is astounding. Expressing such confidence in something that is clearly unknowable (or worse, false) is dangerous.

There's no need to panic unless the authorities continue to downplay the seriousness of the disease, and continue to show their incompetence in handling contagious diseases.

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Another aspect of the CDC communication was the deliberate obtuse response that the CDC head had to suggestions of travel restrictions.

"Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Tom Frieden warned Saturday that imposing a travel ban to the countries known to be dealing with an Ebola outbreak could make the problem worse, as it would cut off the affected areas from receiving necessary medical aid."

But, of course, nobody anywhere has suggested a ban on travel into the affected countries. And he well knows that.

EDIT: Here is a change.org petition that I created today which I think addresses the issue of aid workers and medical transfer patients, etc.:

https://www.change.org/p/barack-obama-and-u-s-senate-and-u-s...

Not many people are going to fly into a country that has an outbreak knowing they can't get out.

There's a zillion sane ways to handle that problem: for the not obviously infected, confine them for 21+ days of being nonsymptomatic. That would have caught our current index case (AKA Patient Zero). For the infected, send them straight to a hospital equipped for this, we've got 4 of them, our military is building one in Liberia right now, we could make more, and more beds in the ones we have, here and over there.

This could be remedied by allowing 'new entries' after a certain time to exit with proper screening, couldn't it?

When was the last time the American people panicked over a disease, vs. the always excitable media? I don't get the impression from my parents or my readings that "panic" resulted from polio in the '50s (although I gather a lot of swimming pools went empty at times), and I'm pretty sure not since then. But of course we haven't been stressed with something this bad since perhaps the days of yellow fever, e.g. the 1878 epidemic.

I seriously doubt we'll "panic" per se, but I wouldn't bet on idiots like Thomas Frieden remaining in charge of things like the CDC.

Don't forget the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic. Or the 1957 Asian Flu pandemic. Or polio. Or the rest of these [0].

I was very aware of the Spanish Flu and Polio but no so much the rest.

And to say "this bad" when talking about 6,000 infections in Africa seems silly compared to most of these. 675,000 dead in USA (20 million across the globe) from Spanish Flu (my great grandfather included).

You mentioned polio of course but just because there aren't as many ready recordings doesn't mean people weren't stressed and/or panicked about these things.

[0] - http://www.healthline.com/health/worst-disease-outbreaks-his...

Ah, yeah, the 1918 Spanish Flu was bad. But not 18th Century yellow fever or Ebola (potentially) bad (in the US). Using your figure of 675,000 dead, that's a fatality rate for the whole population of 0.6-0.7%, based on the 1920 and 1910 Census figures. Just now looking at Wikipedia, it's estimated that 28% of the population got it, so that would make a US Case Fatality Rate of 2.6% ... bad, but not hardly as bad as much of the rest of the world.

It was fantastic transmissible, plus its killing young healthy people is part of what made it so bad, a lot of older folk at least in the US appear to have had some immunity. However WWI wartime censorship kept a lid on greater recognition of how bad it was (it got its name because reporting on neutral Spain was allowed).

So I don't put it in the same league, and the late '50's Asian flu killed "only" around 69,800 Americans (per Wikipedia), so ... well, how many of us expect Ebola to kill that many in the country? I expect/hope sanity will prevail, that the Politically Correct will be shouted down or hounded out of office/their positions, and once we revert to the old fashioned quarantine methods the death toll will be small. But plenty will label that process as "panic" ... and if it doesn't happen, well, we may indeed see something close to well justified "panic".

So say the death toll in the U.S. ends up being ~2 people, are you going to revisit your assumptions and conclusions? Or would that outcome be easily dismissed as belonging to luck?

The CDC's responses are unsurprisingly politicized ("Nothing to see here, move along"), and miss the common sense point that unless a disease is 100% curable, nothing is certain about it. Transmission theories may be backed by significant data, but the data is still a sample subject to confidence and interpretation.

Some of the authorities are still acting like it's the 80s.

Despite a few flare ups of panic, they did a pretty good job of getting the word out about HIV/AIDS when there was a lot of misinformation out there.

This is different for two very important reasons.

1. We just don't know how communicable Ebola is if people spend a lot of time in close proximity to an infected person.

2. Widespread access to internet "news" sources can spread misinformation extremely quickly.

They seem to be afraid to admit that there are things that they still don't know.

Honesty is the best policy.

There isn't yet any clear cause for panic, so start with that and go from there.

I'm not sure how much room there is for "internet 'news' sources" to spread misinformation, at least in a populace who accepts the germ theory of disease, even if most are fuzzy on viri vs. bacteria.

Nigeria's recent Ebola experience gives us hope that the best supportive care can reduce the death rate to something below 50%, they had 20 cases, 19 lab confirmed, 8 deaths. But for the time being it's still inevitably going to be very deadly, although mutations to less severe forms would be advantageous. Whereas to truly airborne would take multiple ones, we're pretty sure, and is very unlikely. Although not 0%, but real close.

That's probably where there's harm that can be done, but as this article and discussion note, we don't really know the truth now. I suppose that the currently inept internal US response could lead to people giving credence to "it transmits like the flu!" (which per the above is neither true nor likely to become so). Certainly people including ones claiming to be doctors are saying that now in "internet 'news' sources" ... are people believing that? (I and my family know too much medicine and biology for that.)

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