Is It Already an Ebola-Gate Affair?

Although there have been only three Ebola cases in America, the virus has caused widespread concern and even panic. The right criticizes President Obama for the series of catastrophic bloopers by health services.

On Saturday, a rapid transit station in Dallas was paralyzed. The media reported that a woman from the high-risk group who had come into contact with “patient zero” vomited on a station platform and posed a mortal threat for others. The police and fire service blocked entrances to the station, while health care professionals in masks and dungarees searched the place. Disinfection was carried out not only inside the whole car, but also inside the whole train.

After a couple of hours, it turned out that the woman did not have any contact with “patient zero” — Thomas Duncan, who had flown from Liberia and died in Dallas. She wasn’t on the list of people kept under observation and she didn’t vomit, but spat.

The above case is extreme, but observing media coverage might give the impression that the Ebola virus has grabbed hold of Americans’ attention. Satirists claim — and they are right — that in the U.S. there is a virus called “fearbola” (fear of the Ebola virus) that you can get by watching CNN or Fox News.

In the state of Maine, a teacher was sent on three weeks’ vacation just because she took part in a seminar in Dallas. Representatives demand that President Obama close the borders for all newcomers from West Africa, where there is a real Ebola epidemic (in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, where so far 9,000 cases have been diagnosed and 4,500 people have died).

In Pennsylvania, during a football match between two local public schools, viewers called one player Ebola — he was a 16-year-old boy from Guinea, who had arrived in the U.S. three years ago. The coach and his assistant were fired from work, and disciplinary actions initiated against students who mocked their colleague are still ongoing.

Right-wing columnists hold the view that the virus has ultimately humiliated Obama’s administration, in the same way Hurricane Katrina attacked New Orleans and disgraced George W. Bush due to the passivity of the government.

The comparison is exaggerated, but there is something to that. The series of mistakes that were recently made by American health services are really impressive. Duncan felt well during the whole flight, but a few days later he developed a high fever and went to a hospital in Dallas. He told a nurse that he had just arrived from Liberia, and she even wrote it down on his patient’s card. Still, he was sent home with a diagnosis of “minor viral infection.” A couple days later, he came back to the hospital in an ambulance. It didn’t really matter for him because medicine doesn’t know any effective treatment for those infected with the Ebola virus — “treatment” is based on creating optimal conditions for a person to combat the sickness (still, nearly half of patients die).

Nevertheless, Duncan could have infected other people within those couple of days outside of the hospital; several dozen people are constantly being monitored. When he was finally hospitalized, he infected two nurses. To this day, the state health service doesn’t know how it was possible, because entering patients’ rooms without masks and dungarees is prohibited. It is said that health and safety rules must have been violated. This situation is all the stranger considering that it is generally hard to contract the Ebola virus — statistically, people “pass on” the virus to only two others (someone who has measles usually infects 17 people, and someone who has the flu, only a few people).

One of those nurses had a fever at the airport — she was heading to her family in Charlotte — and called the Federal Aviation Administration to ask whether she could board the plane. And she received consent! On the following morning, she had classic symptoms of the Ebola virus. Then, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that it is “contacting” 138 passengers on the flight.

As if this were not enough, one of the workers from the hospital in Dallas took a ferry across the Caribbean. He boarded a cruise ship alongside thousands of people. When this information was announced, the ship was prevented from entering Cozumel Port in Mexico. Before he came back to Texas, he had given a blood sample for analysis.

All this made Barack Obama cancel a meeting with the sponsors of the Democratic Party and call an extraordinary meeting on the issue of the Ebola virus. Its participants told the New York Times that the president hardly managed to keep his temper. But later on, he appeared on TV and calmly informed the nation that the risk of an Ebola epidemic in America is extremely unlikely.