Nearly two-thirds of Americans are concerned about a widespread Ebola epidemic in the United States, despite repeated assurances from public officials that the country’s modern health-care and disease-surveillance systems will prevent the type of outbreak ravaging West Africa.
Sure, “public officials” might be sure that Ebola cannot reach epidemic levels here, but “public officials” don’t have their own television programs. They haven’t already spent big money coming up with Ebola-themed musical numbers. Do you know how hard it is to find big news in October these days? Sure we have another war going on, but Americans are bored with those and this one doesn’t even have an interesting name or catch phrase yet.
In a Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted in recent days, the number of Americans who say the government should be doing more to prevent additional Ebola cases in the United States is almost twice the number who believe the United States is doing all it can to control the spread of the virus.
That includes overwhelming support — 91 percent — in favor of stricter screening for people traveling to this country from West Africa.
Sigh. I don’t even want to know what we’re going to have to take off at airports to prove we don’t have Ebola.
All right, so there we go. About two in three Americans are concerned that Ebola is coming for us, and a similar wide margin wants the federal government to do more about it, and in response we will be doing largely nothing because the Senate won’t confirm any new administration appointments, is blocking money for additional Ebola response, the state where Ebola actually got to still won’t be expanding health care for its citizens because screw Obama and them both, the media has nothing substantive to contribute other than the aforementioned musical numbers and asking what Sen. John Omnipresent McCain thinks, and our elected leaders won’t actually going to be doing anything between now and November anyway no matter how bad any supposed epidemic became because there’s an election coming up. Feel better now?
No, you are not going to get Ebola. Don’t go around licking your fellow passengers on your next airline flight, mind you, and for a bunch of reasons other than general hygiene, but it will not be an epidemic here. Instead think of this as a limited practice run for what might happen if a deadly airborne disease were to manifest here—think one of the flu variants—in which case this is indeed a demonstration that we’d all be completely screwed. Catchy theme music, though.
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Oh—and we also might want to think about helping to curtail the true epidemic in West Africa. You know, if we’re actually concerned with these things.
