Sara Stern-Nezer and Aliza Monroe-Wise insist that “even if you were on that September 19th flight from Liberia to Dallas and shook the hand of America’s ‘patient zero,’ your risk of transmission remains relatively small.” Julia Belluz looks at how fast Ebola spreads:
A mathematical epidemiologist who studies Ebola wrote in the Washington Post, “The good news is that Ebola has a lower reproductive rate than measles in the pre-vaccination days or the Spanish flu.” He found that each Ebola case produces between 1.3 and 1.8 secondary cases. That means an Ebola victim usually only infects about one other person. Compare that with measles, which creates 17 secondary cases.
If you do the math, that means a single case in the US could lead to one or two others, but since we have robust public health measures here, it probably won’t go further than that.
Jonathan Cohn doesn’t see how we could have prevented the Dallas case:
According to the CDC, the infected traveler to the U.S. had no symptoms when he arrived in the U.S. on Saturday, September 20. A temperature test at a U.S. airport wouldn’t have picked up anything—and that would have been true for at least another four days, because it wasn’t until Wednesday the 24th that he started to feel sick and run a fever.
Public health experts I consulted quickly on Tuesday thought that was entirely predictable, given that Ebola has a long asymptomatic period of up to 21 days. Short of putting all travelers from affected areas into quarantine for three weeks, they said, airport screening isn’t likely to do much. “The idea is misguided,” said Howard Markel, a professor of medicine and communicable diseases at the University of Michigan and author of When Germs Travel. “It would not have worked in the case of an asymptomatic person. Airport screeners look for obvious signs, such as high fever and other visible or measurable signs of illness.”
Rebecca Leber analyzes the CDC’s “textbook response to public health news that has the potential to incite mass panic”:
“Great uncertainty without guidance and support increases unhelpful behavior in a crisis,” Dr. Barbara Reynolds, now director of public affairs at the CDC, wrote in a 2011 blog post. She notes that panic itself is a rare behavior. “From a psychological point of view, panic is best used to explain a behavior that is irrational or counter to a person’s survival.”
But Jesse Walker thinks it’s the press, rather than the public, that is most prone to panic:
Everyday citizens tend to keep their heads in situations like this. As I wrote half a decade ago, when the purported panic on the horizon involved swine flu, “It’s easy to find examples of public anxiety, with every hypochondriac in the country fretting that the cold his kid always catches this time of year was actually the killer flu. But panic? Where’s the evidence of that?” Going through a series of stories that were supposed to show flu hysteria, I was underwhelmed. … In Dallas right now, the chances that people will start stampeding in the streets is far, far smaller than the chances that scare-mongering coverage will make it harder to get good information.
Our complete Ebola coverage is here.
The Dish 