Hacker News Reader

Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

What strikes me odd about the Ebola problem is this seemingly fear to do anything about it. With SARS we had many countries preventing people from traveling, we had border checks, and the restrictions affected air travel.

Yet Ebola while not airborne is far deadlier, so where are the travel restrictions? Is there some PC element to this, or is there some fear of perceived over reaction? Considering two recently publicized cases involved people who should have known better (if not the organizations they are part of) screwing up how are we to deal with people who don't know better understanding the signs and risks?

View on HN

Between levels of service and visa requirements, west Africa is under de facto travel restrictions all the time.

Levels of service have dropped since the outbreak began, and you can bet that, for example, the U.S. State department is not issuing so many visas for individuals in that region.

SARS came from China, Ebola comes from Africa....

ADDED: the downvotes I'm getting for pointing out this simple, uncontestable bit of inconvenient truth guessed by Shivetya rather prove my point, yes? (At one point a net minus 3.)

Yep - they absolutely prove your point.

Africa is a continent that the Western, mostly-white-run world has an incredibly troublesome history with. I suspect this is giving us (in the US) internal fits when we try to decide what to do. Almost anything short of sending direct aid makes it look like we are abandoning them and sending direct aid looks suspiciously like a military invasion (because we'll be sending armed troops).

We haven't even figured out how to "deal with" black people here in the US and those guys over there, well, they're foreign black people.

You wrote: "We haven't even figured out how to 'deal with' black people here in the US..."

That's an absurd statement. The US has an African American president. He was elected twice by a large majority.

Ok, so we dealt with a single black person—now what about the community?

I doubt mr Obama is at all African, he was born in Honolulu for crying out loud. All this crap with African-American is annoying and needs to stop. You don't call white citizens European-American, do you?

“I doubt mr Obama is at all African”

<Baracks> father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a Luo from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Kenya

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama

A somewhat insightful take on that: http://www.ianwelsh.net/why-africa-cant-handle-ebola-the-des...

That post speaks the truth. Kudos to Mr. Welsh for understanding and clearly communicating the core of the issue - I'll have to read more from him.

I hate saying "me too", but I'll say it anyway.

Me too.

Everyone should read the linked post. It's short, it's to the point. It's depressing. I'm glad you highlighted it, because otherwise I would have skipped it.

I was wrong. We do know how to deal with Africa.

By consuming the bounty and leaving them scraps.

>so where are the travel restrictions?

I think people are assuming we can contain any cases that arrive in the west which is probably largely true.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com