print“Six Reasons to Panic,” at the Weekly Standard, offers a sobering, scientific look at the threat of Ebola:
1. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, … this Ebola is related to, but genetically distinct from, previous known strains, and thus may have distinct mechanisms of transmission. … Not everyone is convinced that this Ebola isn’t airborne. Last month, the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy published an article arguing that the current Ebola has “unclear modes of transmission” and that “there is scientific and epidemiologic evidence that Ebola virus has the potential to be transmitted via infectious aerosol particles … even if this Ebola isn’t airborne right now, it might become so in the future. Viruses mutate and evolve in the wild, and the population of infected Ebola carriers is now bigger than it has been at any point in history—meaning that the pool for potential mutations is larger than it has ever been.
2. General infection rates are terrifying, too. … despite the fact that Duncan was a lone man under scrupulous, first-world care, with the eyes of the entire nation on him, his R0 [“‘reproduction number’ … how many new infections each infected person causes”] was 2, just like that of your average Liberian Ebola victim. One carrier; two infections.
4. … The worst-case scenario envisioned by the [CDC] model is anywhere from 537,000 to 1,367,000 cases by January. Just in Liberia. With the fever [is] still raging out of control. …
5. … Marine Corps General John F. Kelly talked about Ebola at the National Defense University two weeks ago and mused about what would happen if Ebola reached Haiti or Central America, which have relatively easy access to America. “If it breaks out, it’s literally ‘Katie bar the door,’ and there will be mass migration into the United States,” Kelly said. “They will run away from Ebola, or if they suspect they are infected, they will try to get to the United States for treatment.” …
6. … it’s a straw-man argument to say that a flight ban wouldn’t keep Ebola fully contained. No one says it would. But by definition, it would help slow the spread of the virus. If there had been a travel ban in place, Thomas Duncan would have likely reached the same sad fate—but without infecting two Americans and setting the virus loose in North America. … Ebola has the potential to reshuffle American attitudes to immigration. If you agree to seal the borders to mitigate the risks from Ebola, you’re implicitly rejecting the “open borders” mindset and admitting that there are cases in which government has a duty to protect citizens from outsiders …
It is quite something when an “elite institution” like the Weekly Standard concedes that, “We have arrived at a moment with our elite institutions where it is impossible to distinguish incompetence from willful misdirection.”