And the US is on the slippery slope to hell as an entire country.
"At one point during the first panel, Senator Burr was asking Dr. Anthony Fauci about taxis being the latest transmission tool, and he wanted to know how long the virus remained infectious on the seat of a taxi. Dr. Fauci said they don’t know and turned it into an answer about dead bodies, which wasn’t what Senator Burr asked."
The US government is limited by the fact that no one in or out of government is omniscient. Anyone speaking on Ebola must limit their message to what is currently known about Ebola--and that actually is very little. Given the lethality of Ebola and lack of medicines to treat it with, it must be handled under the most stringent conditions, in BSL4 labs that have been engineered in such a way that nothing can escape. It takes a lot of training to work in those labs, and few of those labs exist. Efforts to build more labs are met with resistance from the community at the proposed lab site, because people are absolutely sure that the mere presence of a BSL4 lab in their town or city will unleash a horrible disease. As a result, the amount of research that can be done on viruses like Ebola is limited. And now that people are intensely interested in the answers to these questions, those answers simply do not exist.
Burr knew what he was talking about, and knew what he was asking.
Black Agnes forwarded what I think is the most coherent, understandable paper about what R0 is (basic reproduction rate).
R0 is actually made up of three factors:
R0 = (infection/contact) x (contact/time) x (infection/time)
R0 = tau x mean c x d
Burr was asking about d - how long can the virus remain viable on the door handle of a taxi cab?
Tau is the probability that if you come into contact with the disease that you will catch it. Mean c, or c-with-A-line-over-it, is the number of times you will come into contact with an infected person, or the infection itself. It’s called ‘mean c’ because it is an average - the average, or mean, number of times you’ll come into contact with it.
If Fauci doesn’t know what the d is, that’s troubling, since that is testing you don’t have to do with humans.
All you want to know is how long will the virus stay viable OUTSIDE the body. Inside the body, the answer to that is ‘forever’ essentially, even when you are dead.
You can do something about live, infected people, or dead ones. What is impossible to know is whether you end up having to burn a 787 up because once the virus is in the cabin, it can remain viable there for d amount of time.
They took everything the nurse that came down with Ebola (she survived through Zmapp) and burned it. Ipad, Iphone, etc. Burned it. Not cleaned it. They burned it.
That disclosure was telling, especially when you put it together with testimony that the R0 on this is 5 to 20? If it isn’t an airborne pathogen, then it is one of the most durable virus ever outside the body.
Remember, the first factor - tau - can’t exceed 1.0 (its a probability)
This is why the decision to bring it back to the US might have been a really bad one if the virus has the kind of durability Burr thinks it might.
Mean c is a standard probability problem right out of a college text:
“A person carries a germ into the passenger cabin of an airplane and sits on the aisle seat of the very middle row on the left side of the aircraft. From the time he reaches his seat and fastens his seat belt, he falls asleep - not eating any food nor using the restroom. When he wakes, he unfastens his seat belt and exits the aircraft, using the back of the seat in front of him to get out of the row.
Given a tau of 0.5 (50/50 chance if you touch the same place the guy touched you’ll pick up the virus), a mean c of 1 (this is the only point at which you’ll come into contact with it, say in one day) and a d of 24 hours - how many people that day are going to catch and come down with Ebola?
Keep in mind that the health care personnel decided that burning the ipad was the only sure way of disinfecting it. If they had any confidence in being able to clean an iPad, which isn’t exactly made of suede and covered with fine groves, don’t you think they would have? Especially since she ended up surviving?
Burr was the smartest guy up there. I did like Harkin’s reaction to the fact he didn’t know who was running the show in Africa. When he found out, he almost slipped and said “they shouldn’t be running anything . . .”