1000 New Cases; Liberian Deaths March Backwards
No Signs Of Life In Villages Near Capitol Of Sierra Leone
FREETOWN (BBC) --- I briefly visited Sierra Leone, one of the three most affected countries along with Liberia and Guinea, this week.
I flew by helicopter over one of the worst affected areas, the district of Port Loko just north of the coastal capital Freetown.
Other journalists who have been in this district, but on the ground, have reported finding abandoned villages with dead or dying Ebola patients in them, the healthy having fled in fear or in search of food.
So I looked carefully out of the helicopter window.
Even from this height it is usually possible to see signs of normal life.
Typical ones are smoke from cooking fires and colorful daily laundry draped over bushes to dry.
But in a large number of villages there were no signs of life.
I've just received a message from the headmaster of a school in the Liberian capital Monrovia.
The immediate area around his school hasn't been hit by Ebola, but with businesses and government offices closed to try to contain the spread, many people haven't been able to work.
As the headmaster put it "no job no money" and parents in his area have found it impossible to feed their children properly.
"Our teachers are all healthy", he said, in that understated way of Liberians who have had more than their share of war and disasters over the years.
"Except they are in dying need of food."
As Ebola continues to rampage throughout Sierra Leone, Liberia is undergoing a notional drop in cases, except they still seem to be unable to get their information to the UN on time.
(Reuters) MONROVIA - Liberia's President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said on Thursday she would not seek an extension to a state of emergency imposed in August over Ebola, which has hit the country harder than any other this year.The decision effectively ends the state of emergency that officially expired earlier this month, though Sirleaf said a night curfew remains in force. The emergency had allowed authorities to restrict movement in areas hard hit by the virus.So with "only" 300 new cases in the last week (more than they had in the entire country in late July) Liberia figures they may as well just let people go anywhere they want. You figure out whether this is because Ebola is going away, or whether it's because they recognize that Ebola is everywhere, and their "state of emergency" did nothing to prevent that.
Miraculously, as their Ebola cases increase, Liberia's Ebola deaths decrease day after day.
Presumably, at the rate their going, they can erase their way to being Ebola-free by New Year's, except for all those troublesome bodies.
Given the imminent famine and starvation complications, it seems pretty evident that both nations are willing to lie about the epidemic in order to try and secure food shipments and trade.
I would therefore have to call the ongoing numbers reported by the UN increasingly fanciful week after week, and suggest they pull the other leg, as it has bells on it.
And in less than a few days, Mali went from "almost" Ebola-free, to being amidst a blossoming outbreak, as an infected grand imam was taken to Mali's capitol of Bamako, died there of Ebola, and infected a doctor and nurse, as well as most of his own family, and now potentially nearly 300 mourners, including those who (yet again) washed his Ebola-ridden corpse in obedience to funeral ritual.
People Determined To Commit Suicide Are Going To Succeed: Example # 5001 and counting.
14 comments:
Good morning Aesop,
Since I asked my question about predicting the spread of this epidemic on your earlier post, I have thought about some more. Honestly, I am a little surprised that we haven't seen more cases popping up in the US, and I now believe that despite our politicians refusing to institute quarantine for travelers from these 3 countries in West Africa, financial means available to the people there serve as a quarantine measure. I now think that the vast majority simply cannot afford to travel anywhere, and this is good because it counters the stupidity of our politicians and the idiots within the UN. The fact that the UN hasn't yet come out with a resolution condemning Israel for the Ebola crisis in West Africa, since such condemnations represent the UN's favorite activity, is amazing.
To get back to my earlier attempt at predicting unmanageable spread of Ebola to Western Nations, I now think it has to do with its spread to a country like Nigeria. There is no serious physical barrier to prevent land based travel there, such as the Sahara desert. However, it is several countries removed from Liberia. If air travel is restricted, that should buy the world some time. The Ivory Coast is also a potential powder keg and it borders Liberia. This is my prediction, once the disease spreads sufficiently to Ivory Coast, we will see a large uptick in cases in Europe and here, but if it gets to Nigeria in sufficient strength...all hell will break loose.
I greatly appreciate your blogging on this subject. I am aghast but not surprised with how cavalierly the gov't is treating this situation.
Second City Cop reported that 12 people are being monitored for ebola in Chicago.
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=13350456&postID=8379771384434799508
but nary a peep out of any of the other media sources. Seems like they are all falling in line with the recent gag order that says they only report CONFIRMED cases and will not report SUSPECTED cases.
Who are these people?
Where did they come from?
Where are they now?
No answers. Just questions.
Lovely. Just lovely.
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/metro/20141114-dallas-county-monitoring-another-traveler-for-ebola-after-return-from-west-africa.ece?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed
"Dallas County monitoring another traveler for Ebola after return from West Africa" - November 14
Maybe if there was a site or somewhere where people could pool local news results to get SOME idea of what's going on in the U.S. also? Is there one?
Oh, and in case that local dallasnews.com article is "gagged" also, here's the full text:
Dallas County monitoring another traveler for Ebola after return from West Africa
By SHERRY JACOBSON sjacobson@dallasnews.com
Staff Writer
Published: 14 November 2014 10:55 PM
Updated: 14 November 2014 10:55 PM
Dallas County Health and Human Services is monitoring another traveler for the Ebola virus after that person’s arrival Friday from West Africa.
The person, who was not identified, left West Africa on Wednesday and is not exhibiting any symptoms of the disease, health officials said in a news release.
Statewide, dozens of people have returned to Texas from areas of West Africa, where Ebola is spreading, the Texas Department of State Health Services said. All will require 21-day monitoring for the virus, although most are considered at low risk of developing the disease and are not quarantined.
“There have been about 50 travelers who have come back to Texas,” Carrie Williams, the state department’s spokeswoman, said Thursday.
“All were low-risk except the three classified as ‘some risk’ because they were involved in Ebola patient care overseas,” she said. At least one more person was added to the “some risk” category as of Friday.
On Tuesday, Dallas County announced it was monitoring two health care workers for symptoms of the Ebola virus after they recently traveled from Sierra Leone, one of the West African countries hit by the disease. Neither worker is displaying symptoms of the disease.
They worked with the group Doctors Without Borders, a volunteer organization that sends emergency medical help around the globe. All returning medical workers have been instructed to remain off public transportation and to avoid large gatherings of people for 21 days, the incubation period for Ebola.
You aren't supposed to know how many potential cases there are, or where.
There are 150 people/day coming here from West Africa.
The non-reportage of their details is because unless they pop a positive Ebola test, it's no big deal.
Just like it wasn't with Duncan, until he showed up at the ER. Twice.
And like it won't be the next ten or twenty times.
The government, and their willing accomplices in the media, are rolling the dice that they can get past this without getting burned.
Meanwhile, Ebola marches onwards, and we now have between 2-6 times as many people infected there as we did when Duncan arrived. Probability won't be thwarted endlessly, and the current arrangement pretty much guarantees that subsequent outbreaks will occur, until we get one too big to put a lid on before it metastasizes.
This is why you make personal preparations, because it's like hiring alcoholics and lunatics to run the local nuclear power plant.
Sooner or later, someone's going to do something that makes the news.
The Ivory Coast is without question the most backward, booger-eating bunch of the whole batch. Belief in witchcraft tops the continent at 95%.
Symptoms are neither exhibited nor displayed. They are stated - by the person who has the synptoms. Observations of the condition of a patient are signs.
Aesop, you're going to want to read this.
Noted. Posted.
Shit!
(Part 1) It is impossible to understand why Mali has not been added by the U.S. and other Western nations to the list of countries from which travelers are subjected to special scrutiny when entering the country. Is it simply because, as has been so amply demonstrated on the blog so far, governments by their nature are slow and inefficient? Or is it something more sinister, like recognition -- never to be acknowledged by governments anywhere and never allowed to be said out loud in the MSM -- that our "scrutiny" tools are inadequate and just don't work very well and that we simply do not have the capacity, try as we might, to identify those who enter our countries already carrying the infection?
That would be scary if popularly understood. So our real efforts are spent preventing such information from entering the popular mind. That is, I suspect we are in full panic prevention and victims of that other disease, the ever popular Obama "hopey, changey" thing, having no other recourse. The latter would explain it, it seems to me.
Who is in charge of this campaign to sweep adverse developments under the rug and how is it being done? Easy. Just leave it to Lisa Monico and Ron Klain (and their staffs) to identify troublesome -- that is, truthful and worrisome -- Ebola information, call up the publisher of the information, explain that the story is wrong in this or that respect, that the information has been presented in too black and white a form when reality (their reality, their sell, their spin) is much grayer, and that the publisher is unjustifiably scaring the shit out of the unwashed public, something that could have unpredictable, even violent, consequences. And be bad for your own business, too. Then the information gets removed or buried by the publisher, taken out of the public eye to the extent possible.
(Part 2) Do I know this is happening? Of course not. If I'm right, it surprises me that no one has separately reported that it is happening. But doing that would involve paying a terrible price.So maybe it's not so surprising after all. (We did well with suppressing news for a long time by waving the national security flag, too. Not so well these days, though.)
The latest example? The NBC News story this morning about the unfortunate Dr. Salia, his symptoms or lack of them, his age (a young, mid-40s guy), and the ultimate failure to save his life despite best efforts. Here's a piece of it:
"Salia, working at a Methodist hospital in Sierra Leone, first felt ill during the first week of November. But he hadn’t been treating Ebola patients and he’d already come through a 21-day incubation period after a close call with an Ebola patient. And his first blood test for Ebola came back negative on November 7.
"The usual diagnosis for fever and other symptoms in West Africa is malaria, so he treated himself for that, but didn’t get any better. A second test came back positive for Ebola Nov. 10.
"Those few days of delay may have made the difference between life and death for Salia, 44, a legal resident of the U.S. with a wife and two children in Maryland. He was flown to the U.S. on Saturday but his organs had already started shutting down."
"May have made"? "May"? How about "Did"? And what does that mean to you if, mysteriously (not clear just how he got the thing, is it), you contract the disease? Just how many days do you have to get into the full-bore, extraordinarily costly set of treatments we've devised to save your life? Maybe three? And are those treatments going to be made available to little you somehow? There are no good answers to these questions. The real answer is you are almost certainly going to die. Not acceptable to Ms. Monico and Mr. Klain.
So the story, put up front by NBC News this morning, was quickly taken off page one and buried in the back, where you have to hunt for it. (One can just imagine the phone call that got this done: "Well, you still haven't gotten the message have you? What's the matter with you? Stop scaring people!")
Follow Up: Well, it's back on the NBC News front page now, but down the list under Health. So maybe my comment on this particular piece was overblown. But I'm still worried that news is being suppressed and tampered with. Or maybe Americans have become immune to bad news -- even news about Ebola. I don't know, obviously.
Another: I see now that Mali made the Hit Parade on Sunday and that they are checking these people at airports, too. For all the good that does . . . .
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