I am shaking my head today dumbfounded on how the the entire Obama Administration, the entire leftward news media and one self absorbed nurse in Maine cannot get why Main Street America is getting fed up with their Ebola nonsense.  The left is screaming “Fear Mongers!” while the rest of us just look at what has been the public school policy on self-quarantine for DECADES and wondering why Ebola is less of a threat than the common Flu?

Here is just one example (out of tens of thousands of examples across the country). It is the sick policy for Fairfax County, which is just outside DC and probably one of the school districts for many kids with parents IN the Obama administration or in DC Beltway liberal media. And I quote:

I cannot completely prevent the spread of disease but this sick child policy helps me reduce the spread of sickness and disease whenever possible for all children in my care.

…

If a child is ill upon arrival, you will be asked to take the child home. Children showing signs or symptoms of illness must remain at home.

If your child becomes ill while in my care, I will notify you so you can make arrangements to pick up your child as soon as possible.

This kind of policy is known to all parents with kids in public schools. Schools require children with infectious diseases to stay home. In other words, to self-quarantine. This includes cases if Pinkeye, Measles, Mumps and of course the common Flu. At the first sign of an infectious disease kids are pulled from school. End of story.

Which is why the nonsense about Ebola quarantine is so ridiculous. A tiny percentage of those infected by the above diseases are at risk of death. Usually it would require another condition to put someone at risk (age, Asthma, etc).

But Ebola is a totally different beast. Ebola kills and quickly. It has an average death rate of 50%, but can be as high as 90% for some strains.  And every time the disease finds a new host we have the chance of creating a new, deadlier strain.

It is in fact better to be facing colon cancer than Ebola. The survivor rate for various stages of colon cancer are much better, plus the window for detection and treatment is on the order of months, not days.

This is common sense information. We self-quarantine millions of kids a year because of their MINOR infectious diseases.

And you would be better off facing colon cancer than Ebola. How hard is this?

Why risk anyone if all that is required is 21 days to make SURE you are not transporting a deadly killer?

This is why actions by Maine and other states make sense to Main Street:

A handful of states have gone further than federal health officials and ordered quarantines for health workers returning from Ebola-stricken countries in Africa, even when they show no symptoms and therefore would not be contagious anyway.

World health organizations and U.S. infectious-disease experts have called the additional state measures unnecessary and say they could make the outbreak worse in Africa by discouraging Americans from volunteering to go there and help.

Look, these people volunteered and that is good. And most know how to not get infected. They have been doing this for years and have not brought back the disease. But they must understand, it is a crap shoot to pretend there is no risk. No symptoms does not equal not infected. If they pass a virus test, then fine.  But until then – please do as our children do an stay home.

BTW, looks like “science” agrees with Main Street common sense:

Dr. Beutler warned that quarantining and monitoring is a sound policy, not because it is clear that the potentially exposed are clearly infectious, but because there data is inconclusive and there are too few observed cases to know exactly how this disease transmits from host to host.

“It may not be absolutely true that those without symptoms can’t transmit the disease, because we don’t have the numbers to back that up,” Beutler said. “It could be people develop significant viremia [where viruses enter the bloodstream and gain access to the rest of the body], and become able to transmit the disease before they have a fever, even. People may have said that without symptoms you can’t transmit Ebola. I’m not sure about that being 100 percent true. There’s a lot of variation with viruses.”

Major Update: Now we know if you sneeze and have Ebola (unknown to yourself) you can possibly kill someone.

Ebola is a lot easier to catch than health officials have admitted — and can be contracted by contact with a doorknob contaminated by a sneeze from an infected person an hour or more before, experts told The Post Tuesday.

“If you are sniffling and sneezing, you produce microorganisms that can get on stuff in a room. If people touch them, they could be” infected, said Dr. Meryl Nass, of the Institute for Public Accuracy in Washington, DC.

Reminds me of reckless driving, which basically puts others at risk due to lack of self control.

Major Update: This goes into the category where a little knowledge bolstered by a ton of arrogance causes real problems:

While it is fair to say that most members of the medical community believe that Hickox is not a threat to those around her – she has tested negative for the disease, reports that she is feeling fine, and would not be contagious at this stage even if she were infected – some medical professionals are not entirely positive that Ebola cannot be spread by asymptomatic individuals. It is out of an abundance of caution that a number of states, including Hickox’s home state of Maine, have requested that at-risk individuals abide by a voluntary in-home quarantine.

Hickox is not playing a long. The media darling who threatened to sue the state of New Jersey for violating her constitutional rights is now insisting that she will not self-isolate. On Thursday, Hickox left her house for a bike ride with her boyfriend.

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Hickox has such faith in her own deductive powers that she does not believe precautionary measures like quarantining should apply to her or anyone else, and she may be right. But her disregard for consensus opinion is only likely to inspire a backlash and result in the imposition of even stricter quarantining measures.

Wait until her neighbors all individually sue her for reckless endangerment.  They have rights too you know! Then what will she do?

Tags: Ebola, Infectious Disease, Self Quarantine