Today's announcement by the CDC and Texas health authorities certainly got everyone's attention. Dr. Tom Frieden's news conference was brisk and reassuring and not too dominated by talking points.
It was also not too dominated by real information. Dr. Frieden and his colleagues were excessively coy about the patient, citing privacy to decline saying whether he was an American citizen. Like the US MERS cases a few months ago, the Ebola patient was "visiting family in the US." But we do know that he was not involved in fighting Ebola in Liberia.
So he could be a Liberian visiting émigré relatives, or an American working in a Liberian mining enterprise, or a Chinese merchant in Monrovia visiting his Texas cousins.
No doubt the CDC itself knows this person's curriculum vitae down to the last comma, and is tracing his contacts in Liberia at least as assiduously as his contacts in Dallas. We can hope that CDC will eventually publish its findings, carefully laundered of anything that might identify this person.
(Digression: If we're going to deplore the irrational stigma attached to Ebola cases and their families in West Africa, could we please not treat it here as a stigma-free misfortune instead of something that might shame the case's children unto the seventh generation?)
We've already seen several HCWs return to the US from West Africa with Ebola, and no doubt more will follow. As a commenter noted earlier this afternoon, if Ebola can get into the US, it can get into anywhere. That seems to me the lesson of this particular case.
As a recent survivor of air travel to and from Scandinavia, I can attest to the absurdity of the security theatre in several major Canadian and European airports. (At Schiphol, a young Dutch guy patted me down with almost erotic zeal, which at 73 I found oddly flattering. The Finns at Vantaa didn't find me attractive at all.)
Nowhere, amid all the trays full of men's belts and iPads, did anyone aim a high-tech thermometer at me. No one asked me to stick out my tongue and say "Ah." I could have been crawling with fleas infected with Yersinia pestis; if I had, my cute Dutch pal would now be studying his buboes in some damn good Dutch hospital.
Airport security for over a decade has obsessed over suicidal lunatics with exploding shoes, inflicting stress and humiliation on millions of ordinary people. It will take something like a bureaucratic upheaval to get the Dutch to quit copping a feel on septuagenarians and start taking temperatures.
Guys like today's anonymous Ebola case are far more dangerous than quartets of idiots with box cutters and a bad case of "Let's Pretend." Whoever today's guy is, he's the harbinger of many more Ebola bombs with the price of an air ticket out of Freetown or Monrovia.
They may be headed for countries with far feebler health security than the US, and if they get through some airport in Nairobi or Singapore or Jeddah, Hell will present us with an invoice we'd rather not pay.
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