As usual, the country is responding to the Ebla crisis the way they respond to everything else. PANIC!
There is a leadership aspect to decision-making that has nothing to do with what the people want. The Ebola crisis is a perfect example. All our experts, the healthcare workers, the CDC people and various national health officials have told us that a travel ban will not only be unsuccessful but that it will be counter productive. The people on the other hand, up to almost 70% want something like it. They don’t know exactly what it is that they want, they just want to feel protected. That’s understandable but not helpful.
So the real leader, the President, with the backing of all the medical experts, says no travel ban, we must keep the aid moving to and from the affected countries if we hope to stop this plague before it really starts to move around the world, because the longer it exists in West Africa, the better chance it has of spreading first to the rest of Africa and eventually the rest of the planet. But the governors of New York and New Jersey know better, as do the governors of a couple of other places like Maine and Illinois. In a bi-partisan partnership to get some face time and possibly get elected again, they enact their own quarantine on returning healthcare workers.
Cuomo and Christie are reacting to the public outcry, which is exactly what they shouldn’t be doing. They are following, not leading. They were elected to lead, not follow. Yes, the time to listen to your constituents is when you are running for election but even then you must lead and in leading make those frightened people understand that you have been elected to act in their best interests and that in not instituting a ban or any quarantine you are doing just that.
Now that’s how politics should work. We all know that it doesn’t work that way today. This is because an ignorant, venal public elects its mirror image far too often.
That said, the governors of New York and New Jersey aren’t completely wrong in their establishment of some kind of quarantine, they’re just wrong in the way they went about it. The problem is that, like most panic moves, it was done in a half assed manner. The people coming back from the infected countries are heroes who have put their lives on the line to help others. They should be treated as such not dumped into squalid rooms with no facilities and given no information as to what is happening as was the case with Kaci Hickock, the nurse that was grabbed in Newark as she deplaned from Liberia. Yes there should be some kind of medical screening for people like Hickock, but even a bigger yes, it should be in a functional medical facility with complete communication with those who are making decisions over the life of the person quarantined. This is not a difficult thing to make happen, except if you’re Chris Christie, who can figure out how to jam up the4 GWB but not how to get an acceptable toilet into a tent where he is holding a heroine captive.
There aren’t going to be a lot of these people coming in from the infected countries and with very little work and considering their sacrifices they could be comfortably, even luxuriously accommodated. The problem is that people like Cuomo and Christie want to look like they are doing something without actually putting in the time to make it work.
Hickock, who was not exhibiting symptoms of any disease, was, for all practical purposes, arrested at Newark Airport and treated basically like a criminal. This is not the way to get desperately needed healthcare workers to sacrifice their time and risk their lives to help humanity.
Up in Maine, where Hickock went to relax and get away from people, Paul Page a combative little guy, who is the current governor and is running again has decided that despite the fact that she is a-symptomatic, she should still be kept away from the world. As with Cuomo, Christie, et al, who love the TV limelight, Page doesn’t believe that medical decisions should be left to doctors, not at least when there is a vote available to grab. I wonder if next time his kid gets sick, Page will rush him or her to Christie for a diagnosis.
There are very few politicians around who have solved all the problems of their municipalities. This is especially true of Christie and Cuomo. I really don’t know enough about Maine to include Page but just on the betting odds, I would think he belongs in with his political partners on this issue. Maybe they should all concentrate on getting their states in order and leave the medical stuff to the doctors. Hickock risked her life to help others. Can we say anything like that about these three opportunists?
How about a little perspective on the whole situation. Yes, over two thousand people have died of Ebola in West Africa and the world is coming to the aid of those unfortunate countries but in Congo, Somalia, Libya, Ethiopia and Sudan thousands are massacred each week in ethnic, religious and tribal clashes that no one seems to notice or care about.
One person has died in this country of Ebola and that person caught it in West Africa, but a year ago 20 children and six teachers were gunned down in Sandy Hook School in Newtown, CT and each week since then we have had some kind of similar incident in some school in this country and so far our nation has not done a God damn thing about any of it. If you aren’t too terrified about getting an almost non-existent disease, take a moment and think about that.