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Dallas Ebola Show Good Plans Can Fail
Long, tragic experience in West Africa helped experts write plans to protect Americans should the Ebola virus arrive on U.S. soil. Screening questions and procedures were crafted to succeed if everyone followed them.
Good plans do not expect perfection, and plan accordingly.
But the careful planning broke down during a single late-night shift in a Dallas emergency room. Human and institutional missteps turned Thomas Eric Duncan’s low-grade fever and stomach pain into a public-health crisis and subjected a prestigious hospital to global criticism.

Day 1 for Duncan was apparently Sept. 15, according to The New York Times and The Associated Press. That was when he helped carry a pregnant, desperately ill woman into a hospital in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, then took her back home because the hospital had no room. The woman died from Ebola that day. Her brother died the next day.
Gee, I wonder if they were contagious?
On Sept. 19, Day 4 after exposure, Duncan went to Roberts International Airport in Monrovia for a United Airlines flight to Brussels and on to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. His temperature, like that of other departing passengers, was taken repeatedly -- a precaution against the spread of Ebola, which often shows up first through a fever.
Per this story at Science Insider (hat tip Ace of Spades), the people checking the temperatures do not know what they are doing. The precaution is useless.
Duncan had no fever, according to Dr. Tom Frieden, head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He was allowed to board his flight to Brussels.

This week, news reports added a critical detail: At the Monrovia airport, Duncan replied "no" on a form that asked if he had been in contact with an Ebola patient.
Really good plans do not fall apart because of human prevarication. He was perhaps concerned he might not be allowed to leave had he been truthful?
That apparent deception meant CDC screening guidelines for U.S. hospitals were about to face their biggest test.
Which they failed. You knew that.
Presbyterian's failure to follow the guidelines may illustrate one reason emergency planning is often futile. People tend to regard adherence to the procedures as a mundane chore, rather than "something urgent and imminent," he said.

"Psychologically, most of us feel that it can't happen to us, or it won't happen here," he said. "Africa is far away, and Ebola seems like an abstraction. So when the symptoms show up, at some level we don't actually believe it."
Sort of like the southern border issue.
Presbyterian's emergency room staff may have viewed Duncan as a routine patient with a minor bug because that's what they expected. By contrast, hospitals that follow the guidelines aggressively say they work.

Dallas' biggest hospital, Parkland Memorial, knows precisely how many of the 30,000 patients it screened between Aug. 6 and Sept. 30 had been to an Ebola-affected country: 16. None needed further evaluation or isolation, a spokeswoman said last week.
Now if that turns out to be in error, then you should worry.
There is a part of this story that I don't get: I understand (truly) that a man in Liberia who says to himself "Oh my stars and garters! I think I might have Ebola!!", and who holds an American passport, would do whatever he could possibly do so that he could be treated in an American hospital. After all, if you're in Liberia right now you know that a Liberian hospital is a death sentence.

So okay, plane touches down in Dallas and you clear customs. At this point your choices are:

a) go home to sweetie-pie's apartment and soak the Ebola into the bedsheets
b) go to the hospital eventually and lie about what's wrong with you
c) go to the hospital tout-suite and confess that you might have Ebola

Given that you just flew 8,000 miles and lied to just about everyone to get here, why on earth would you do anything other than choice (c)? Yet Mr. Duncan chooses to hold the fort down with his S.O.

Something doesn't add up here. It might be nothing more than human stupidity, but I think there's more to the story than we've been told.

Posted by: Bobby 2014-10-05
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=401396