I keep hearing references to “panic” over Ebola. Are you seeing _panic_ in your communities? Anywhere?

— jimgeraghty (@jimgeraghty) October 16, 2014

All over right wing sites, who are claiming that Obama lost Ebola (or cause it to spread, and panic is behind the GOP calls to stop flights to Africa).

But when you unpack the demands that the Administration stop flights coming in or out of Africa, or banning people w/visas from coming to the US from West Africa, they ignore that we now have an outbreak cluster here in the US - and that the same bans would apply using the GOP logic.

If there’s a chance that the disease spreads by people taking flights, then the prudent course of action is to stop flights to/from Dallas or Texas generally. Because that’s the only way to contain the risk (one of the motivations for the bans).

But they wont extend the logic in this way, because it exposes the reality that this is because Africans are dying of Ebola, they don’t want any Africans coming here, even though we’ve got one case - and it’s someone who didn’t exhibit any symptoms on the flight.

The Vinson case highlights the problems with using fever as an indicator of illness. She didn’t have a fever within the usual parameters for Ebola, so the CDC apparently let her fly after she contacted them. At the other end, you’d have people who are stopped from flying even though the higher fever doesn’t indicate anything relating to Ebola.

The best indication that someone might be a carrier of Ebola is that they’ve come into direct contact with someone who has the disease. As such, anyone delivering care to Ebola patients, or who has come from West African countries should be closely screened and monitored to avoid spreading the disease even inadvertently.

It also falls on to the hospitals to do a better job at infection control. All evidence points to massive failures at Texas Presbyterian because they took the cheap way out - and instead of treating the case as a likely Ebola case, decided to wait until blood tests returned a definitive case. The added cost of Ebola infection control may have been the deciding factor, rather than keeping everyone coming into contact with Duncan from unnecessary exposure. And it also points to failures of the Texas Department of Health from doing their job in making sure that infection control was a top priority - meaning that if there was a suspected case that they treat it as such until ruled out - not using less secure means until confirmed.

The hospital may try to shift the blame elsewhere - as on to the nursing staff themselves, but that’s a strategy likely to backfire as nurses are the ones who keep hospitals running. They’re the primary caregivers and come into contact with patients more than any other staff. People are going to notice what the hospitals are doing too, and that this all rings of hospitals putting the cost ahead of patient and employee safety.