Ebola: The tolling bell
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Ebola: The tolling bell
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Re: Ebola: The tolling bell
#2While the situation is serious - it will be contained eventually in my view.
As cynical as it sounds I think there are many positive effects being overlooked here. People need a good wake-up every now and again.
We suddenly realized that there is zero global coordination. There is just no global immediate response mechanism in place to deal with this type of stuff. In the Hollywood movies you see the American tanks roll in as a show of force to contain an area...but where are the American tanks in Nigeria?
Sure eventually UN & US mechanisms kicked in (which is great) but I still feel it was subpar. Not in the sense of the people under-performed (they're great) but rather that the structures in place under-performed / don't exist.
Personally I think there should be a global response team. i.e. one group that has the ability to declare an emergency (Ebola) and then specific governments can buy in or not (and delegate power & funding). Based on that buy-in the team either has power or it does not. In this case, with EU and US buy-in such a team would have vast of power over many nations - and many other nations will follow a US/UN/EU alliance blindly (imagine finding yourself on the wrong side of that). With THAT kind of response you can counter an epidemic.
Thats a bit of a pipe dream sure, but it illustrates what I mean by saying we lack a global immediate response team. Now I'm not suggesting the above should be implemented - its more of a thought experiment...the fact remains that the current model is not capable of deal with Ebola let alone other stuff (that shall remain unnamed in the interest of keeping things on track)
Re: Ebola: The tolling bell
#3While the situation is serious - it will be contained eventually in my view. As cynical as it sounds I think there are many positive effects being overlooked here. People need a good wake-up every now and again. We suddenly realized that there is zero global coordination. There is just no global immediate response mechanism in place to deal with this type of stuff. In the Hollywood movies you see the American tanks r…
I have been thinking the same. It seems that America desperately needs an enemy sometimes. If there isn't one available, it kind of makes them up to keep busy. This is a golden opportunity for the USA to bring the world together and fight a real enemy worth defeating and perhaps regain some of it's lost luster. Well I'm hoping anyway.
Re: Ebola: The tolling bell
#4While the situation is serious - it will be contained eventually in my view. As cynical as it sounds I think there are many positive effects being overlooked here. People need a good wake-up every now and again. We suddenly realized that there is zero global coordination. There is just no global immediate response mechanism in place to deal with this type of stuff. In the Hollywood movies you see the American tanks r…
I often think that people just can not conceive of the scales of disasters that are possible and can befall anybody, including the US. You look at the frankly incredible measures that may be necessary to prevent an outbreak, and it's easy to imagine the costs, the screaming from the affecting (and, given the topic, possibly the literal screaming on the evening news of perfectly innocent people against their will being confined in their own houses unto literal death), the economic costs of shutting things down and quarantining people, etc., politically and economically all very expensive, and in the face of an imagination unable to truly, fundamentally believe these things are possible, the will to take the necessary actions can not be found, because the benefits are literally inconceivable.
And there are oh-so-many things that are so much more fun to spend time on for those in authority, and the odds that their fundamental preparations will be found wanting so low during their tenure, that the appeal of shifting all resources and money away from basic prep is tempting to the point of irresistibility.
Unfortunately, the disasters that can occur are not bounded by our imagination.
(And I do mean fun for those in authority. Contemplating emergencies is not fun. Exerting primate dominance over others in the so very many varied ways that humans are capable of is so much more fun.)
Re: Ebola: The tolling bell
#5While the situation is serious - it will be contained eventually in my view. As cynical as it sounds I think there are many positive effects being overlooked here. People need a good wake-up every now and again. We suddenly realized that there is zero global coordination. There is just no global immediate response mechanism in place to deal with this type of stuff. In the Hollywood movies you see the American tanks r…
I often think that people just can not conceive of the scales of disasters that are possible and can befall anybody, including the US. You look at the frankly incredible measures that may be necessary to prevent an outbreak, and it's easy to imagine the costs , the screaming from the affecting (and, given the topic, possibly the literal screaming on the evening news of perfectly innocent people against their will bei…
People need an emotional connection to a disaster or emergency before they begin to contemplate the effects and either take action or donate time/money/resources to help. Asking for money to help prevent a future disaster is a lot harder connection to make with donors.
A recent NPR Planet Money podcast highlighted the difficulty in raising money to fight Ebola:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/09/22/349962559/why-rais...
"Donors like being part of a recovery story. In Haiti, buildings and lives were destroyed. The pitch was, let's help them rebuild. In the case of Ebola, it's been harder to make a pitch."
Re: Ebola: The tolling bell
#6While the situation is serious - it will be contained eventually in my view. As cynical as it sounds I think there are many positive effects being overlooked here. People need a good wake-up every now and again. We suddenly realized that there is zero global coordination. There is just no global immediate response mechanism in place to deal with this type of stuff. In the Hollywood movies you see the American tanks r…
I often think that people just can not conceive of the scales of disasters that are possible and can befall anybody, including the US. You look at the frankly incredible measures that may be necessary to prevent an outbreak, and it's easy to imagine the costs , the screaming from the affecting (and, given the topic, possibly the literal screaming on the evening news of perfectly innocent people against their will bei…
And, of course, the conspiracy theories.
"They're doing this to institute martial law and kill us all! NWO FEMA death camps! Obama's HitlerStalin on a rampage! JEWS!"
The more extreme versions won't gain much traction, but the smaller ones which tie into pre-existing crap like anti-vaccine sentiment will gain enough to make life difficult for the people trying to improve things.
Re: Ebola: The tolling bell
#7While the situation is serious - it will be contained eventually in my view. As cynical as it sounds I think there are many positive effects being overlooked here. People need a good wake-up every now and again. We suddenly realized that there is zero global coordination. There is just no global immediate response mechanism in place to deal with this type of stuff. In the Hollywood movies you see the American tanks r…
I have been thinking the same. It seems that America desperately needs an enemy sometimes. If there isn't one available, it kind of makes them up to keep busy. This is a golden opportunity for the USA to bring the world together and fight a real enemy worth defeating and perhaps regain some of it's lost luster. Well I'm hoping anyway.
>USA to bring the world together
Not quite what I had envisioned when I talked about a global response team. I guess thats why we don't have a global response team. :(
And thats not meant as an anti-american comment but rather as a realization that countries don't get along all that well.
Re: Ebola: The tolling bell
#8This could become the new trend, as populations concentrate more and more in cities, creating slums, the conditions to catalyze outbreaks increase exponentially. I agree with the author that the cause of the recent epidemic has to do with the geographic location of the initial cases.
Re: Ebola: The tolling bell
#9I think the author is overestimating how prepared the US healthcare system is to handle a real threat if one arises:
- The U.S. has been advertising that we're the ones with the cure for ebola, so where is anyone with money going to go as soon as they get exposed? And while most of the victims are among the urban poor, there will be more wealthy people who become infected as the epidemic increases in scale.
- Even if we have better technology, the cost of treating each victim here is exponentially higher. The cost for each patient could easily be close to a million dollars if you count 2+ weeks in the ER, licensed biohazard disposal and decontamination, network tracing, quarantining exposed contacts, etc.
- Nearly 50M Americans don't have health insurance. If going into the ER risked you getting kept there while waiting for test results, possibly losing your job, and getting getting stuck with a bill for tens of thousands of dollars even if you don't have ebola, it's hard to imagine that many of those people aren't going to just wait a few extra days.
- In the US healthcare workers are generally paid well enough that they can just leave their jobs, maybe not comfortably, but with enough money to at least feed themselves and get by. It's hard to imagine that we won't have large numbers of healthcare workers just taking off if this ever gets serious. Especially since US healthcare workers aren't trained to deal with ebola, and largely aren't interested -- notice how most of the people going to west Africa to volunteer in this crisis are missionaries, not doctors.
- We have all sorts of religious fundamentalists in the US who think it's god's will that the US be destroyed for condoning homosexuality or whatever who would be more than happy to help the process along, and more than enough people abroad who would gladly sacrifice their own lives to disrupt our foreign/domestic policy.
Re: Ebola: The tolling bell
#10"The current Ebola epidemic may well become the worst human disaster in this century. And we are not doing enough about it."
Ok, I think anyone here generally understands how dangerous Ebola is and could become if it continues to spread.
That being said, already this century:
Smoking has killed roughly 60 million people
HIV / AIDS has killed 20 to 25 million
Malaria has killed eight million
Diarrhoea has killed perhaps 15 million
We're a long ways yet from Ebola competing as a worst human disaster candidate. To put it in stark perspective, it could kill a million people before it's contained (100+ fold more than it likely currently has), and it still wouldn't get near the health disasters I listed. I don't really understand why people persist with inflating Ebola's stature (or downplaying the other health disasters, however you want to look at it). The only conclusions I've come to, are that Ebola has been sensationalized for years by Hollywood and the media (on-going), and its mortality rate and rapid nature are obvious fear points. I still don't see how the fear adds up when compared to millions of children dying from diarrhoea, except that these are things most people think they can't get / won't die from.