Breaking:WASHINGTON (USAToday) – The Department of Homeland Security announced Tuesday that all travelers from Ebola outbreak countries in West Africa will be funneled through one of five U.S. airports with enhanced screening starting Wednesday.This would be about the 20th time the previous way of doing things in this crisis was so intelligent, it needed to be fixed.
Customs and Border Protection within the department began enhanced screening – checking the traveler's temperature and asking about possible exposure to Ebola – at New York's John F. Kennedy airport on Oct. 11.
Enhanced screening for travelers from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea was expanded Oct. 16 to Washington's Dulles, Chicago's O'Hare, New Jersey's Newark and Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airports.
Those airports were supposed to screen 94% of the average 150 people per day arriving from the three countries. But lawmakers from other states asked for enhanced screening at their airports, too.
Some lawmakers have also called for more restrictions, such as suspending visas or simply denying entry at ports for citizens from the three countries.
Jeh Johnson, secretary of homeland security, announced that travelers from West Africa must arrive at one of the five airports starting Wednesday.
It's now a short step to admitting - right after the next Ebola victim arrives here anyways, because you can't "screen" asymptomatic people to catch those with Ebola - that all future visas for those three countries will be cancelled, and admitting that anyone going there will need to proceed back through a mandatory quarantine stop.
Just like everyone with any common sense has been telling them all along.
No word on how the new rules will affect the 11M illegal aliens already here, or those who enter across the Mexican border essentially unhindered. Doubtless Jeh Johnson wasn't aware that we share a border with Mexico, and another one with Canada, and of course no comments on what happens when travelers decide to simply fly from Europe to Mexico City or Toronto, and then hop a bus or take a walk.
This may affect the planned executive amnesty order though.
8 comments:
Wow, we have an Ebola Czar one day and things start happen. I'm impressed.
( That was sarcasm if you didn't know.)
Yeah, you should see how he handled Solyndra.
I'm pretty much just waiting for him to live up to all my expectations, and screw the pooch even harder than Frieden has.
Like the next Ebola victim coming here, it's not an if question, it's a when question.
I'm waiting to see how successfully Cuba manages to spread the plague around Latin America as their docs rotate back and forth.
(For not one second do I assume that Cuba had reasons other than purely political for getting involved.)
Well what is even more fun is that not everyone that will die from Ebola will have a fever. Great!
Aesop-
Thoughts on this...
"Ebola control: effect of
asymptomatic infection
and acquired immunity
Evidence suggests that many Ebola
infections are asymptomatic,
a factor overlooked by recent outbreak summaries and projections.
Particularly, results from one post Ebola outbreak serosurvey showed that 71% of seropositive individuals did not have the disease; another studyreported that 46% of asymptomatic close contacts of patients with Ebola were
seropositive. Although asymptomatic
infections are unlikely to be infec
tious,they might confer protective
immunity and thus have important
epidemiological consequences"
http://download.thelancet.com/flatcontentassets/pdfs/PIIS0140673614618390.pdf
1) It's an interesting theory.
2) Time will tell.
3) The extrapolations are based on numbers from the pitifully small number of cases in prior outbreaks. For example, there are more new cases since about the 1st of this month to today, than the total number ever worldwide from 1976-2013, inclusive.
4) So if it works, great. It could help curb the outbreak faster than anything we do.
But if it doesn't, it will continue it's wildfire-like spread completely unhindered.
5)So we may not have the time required in #2, above, to find out.
Still too little too late on all fronts,the Lancet theory and the vaccines. Containing Ebola to the three countries is not likely,more like not possible with the latest I heard about a disagreement about an Ebola patient caused an argument to degenerate into rioting and gunfire.
People are going to start getting out of Liberia and Sierra Leone, and Guinea even if they have to walk.
Only a matter of time until it spreads far and wide-and as you said-the continent burns.
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