If We're Lucky

As bad as the economy has been since China destroyed USA's manufacturing, it could be worse. We don't have constant rioting, we don't have many Free Fire Zones, and the murder rate in most places are pretty low, far lower than predicted by the FBI crime statistics due to First Person Shooter video games and widespread atheism. Its religious zealots that suicide bomb market places and ax-attack cops. If you think God is a hoax, a lot of crimes just don't happen. So that's an upside. Now we've got Doctors Without Borders Morals ignoring basic epidemiology and potentially infecting millions, half of whom will die from ebola. We might be lucky. They might be lucky. He might be an ineffective liberal bastard that didn't manage to kill the east coast 16 days from now. We'll see. Quarantine is something they even teach in high school biology classes. It's a simple concept. This Doctor Without Borders Morals ignored it, which is either incompetent or evil. Thousands might die in 3 weeks. And millions after that. Being an atheist, I can't exactly pray for good fortune. I can only wait for the consequences.

The Middle Class, according to James Burke in Connections, arose from the massive die-off of the Black Plague in the Middle Ages because it concentrated the minimal wealth of the poor into the survivors hands and freed up their efforts to do other things, like crafts and mechantile, and the normal human response to a die off is aggressive reproduction. If say, ebola kills 1/3 of the population of the world starting with the USA, there's going to be very complex inheritance as well as very complex collapse of economic activity and public utilities because technically skilled people also die off as easily as broom operators and clerks. Anybody who deals with the public is at risk, from grocery clerks and librarians to shop keepers and people who go to movie theaters. Enclosed rooms and shared furniture that doesn't see sunlight? That's a major risk for plague. Particularly since we DON'T KNOW just how easily it spreads, or if it has mutated into a version which is airborne and durable since that helps its reproduction. A few years ago there was an outbreak of swine flu and I worked in a place that made the biodetection kits. Everybody there got swine flu from the door handles, including me. One weekend with a fever, I was fine afterwards, but if it had been ebola? A serious number of bioworkers would be dead. Our managers met with people who met with doctors who dealt with swine flu and were infected without knowing it, and they put their virus on our door handles, all over the building. That's how it got us. And our UV glass also meant that sunlight couldn't kill the virus indoors, and the air conditioning kept it at ideal storage, everywhere. There were close to 1000 people, including families of the workers, impacted by this outbreak where I worked.

 

Utilities workers tend to have good immune systems, but they also tend to have old fashioned managers who insist on in-person meetings rather than safely online and could potentially all get ebola while discussing what to do about ebola when it reaches their towns. If the utility workers die  after their managers visit with politicians who visited doctors with ebola, passing it along, our lights might not stay on. We'd do well to prepare for the potential power outages during storms, and consider the possibility they might not come back on soon. Over the last few years, blizzards have knocked out power for days at a time, even close to town. The locals around here rapidly became familiar with the entire gas powered generator market. Honda Generators are preferred because they work well and as reliably as diesel generators, with a much lower noise level and much shorter startup time. They cost twice as much because they're better.

 

Another thing to think about is water supply. Will ebola get into the water when the water treatment plant workers get too sick to mind the machines? Their bosses are going to those meetings with politicians as well. Even with really good immune systems, you are still at risk.

1918 Spanish Flu had the same kind of death rate as Ebola does, and our civilization pretty well ground to a halt until the flu mutated into its current low sub-1% death rate. Ebola is a 50% death rate. If we're lucky that will drastically decrease when its infection rate goes up. If Ebola drops to modern Flu level death rates we can stop panicking. Until then, we need to treat this seriously, and Doctors Without Borders Morals who come back from Africa and potentially contaminate subways, train stations, and tens of thousands of people in places without UV light and a union that never cleans the place, much less with bleach... this is an ideal case of bioterrorism. If I'd been on one of those trains in New York City, I'd be self quarantined and getting grocery deliveries dropped off at my door. Of course, Doctors Without Morals is TOO SUPERIOR TO FOLLOW QUARANTINE. And in 16 more days, we'll know if that whining nurse is clean or not. She wouldn't follow quarantine either. She broke quarantine, risked thousands or millions of lives, and should have her medical license yanked by the Medical Board. Doctors Without Borders Morals needs to be treated as a serious threat, and either denied entry or quarantined by armed troops since they don't do it properly, just like anyone with an Africa stamp on their passport. This is harsh, but there are too many unknowns and too many risks in a disease class that is well known to mutate and change. Viruses do this because they evolve quickly. How they were a few years ago, and were documented in various studies and papers, doesn't mean they will be like that tomorrow, or even yesterday. Self quarantine easily leads one to consider the survival value of not shaking hands, touching things in public, or associating with snide and superior twits who think Africa is a fabulous place to be better than everyone else. And yes, that describes all Liberal Jet Setters. I know far too many of them. Better than you, better than you. Nose in the air. Sigh. Human nature is disgusting. And perhaps if we aren't lucky, self limiting.