Back in my day when we received edited and screened news and opinion from three cloned networks, usually a week late, it was easier to say that we were in the dark, almost continuously. But not today.
What we have today are thousands of sources, most of them inaccurate or at best incomplete, and much of it supposition. So when a reader absorbs it, and then repeats the supposition as factual, the facts become distorted or are just nonsense.
The trick now is to weed through all that smoke and try to determine how much if any of it makes sense when applied to a base of solid known facts.
Unfortunately, some people are not very good at doing that is the social media environment, and that may not be a very good thing over time.
for all you armchair quarterbacks -
YOU NEED TO READ THE FRIGGING BOOK
From the Hot Zone pages 17 -19
"He found Monet lying on the gurney. He has no idea what was wrong with the man, except that he was obviously having some kind of massive hemorrhage. There was no time to try to figure out what has caused it.
He was having difficulty breathing-and then his breathing stopped. He had inhaled blood and had a breathing arrest. Dr. Musoke felt for a pulse. It was weak and sluggish. A nurse ran and fetched a laryngoscope, a tube that can be used to open a person's airway. Dr. Musoke ripped open Monet's shirt so that he could observe any rise and fall of the chest, and he stood at the head of the gurney and bent over Monet's face until he was looking directly into his eyes, upside down.
Monet stared redly at Dr. Musoke, but there was no movement in the eyeballs, and the pupils were dilated. Brain damage: nobody home. His nose was bloody and his mouth was bloody. Dr. Musoke tilted the patient's head back to open the airway so that he could insert the laryngoscope. He was not wearing rubber gloves. He ran his finger around the patient's tongue to clear the mouth of debris, sweeping out mucus and blood. His hands became greasy with black curd. The patient smelled of vomit and blood, but this was nothing new to Dr. Musoke, and he concentrated on his work. He leaned down until his face was a few inches away from Monet's face, and he looked into Monet's mouth in order to judge the position of the scope. Then he slid the scope over Monet's tongue and pushed the tongue out of the way so that he could see down the airway past the epiglottis, a dark hole leading inward to the lungs. He pushed the scope into the hole, peering into the instrument. Monet suddenly jerked and thrashed.
Monet vomited.
The black vomit blew up around the scope and out of Monet's mouth.
Black-and-red fluid spewed into the air, showering down over Dr. Musoke.
It struck him in the eyes. It splattered over his white coat and down his chest, marking him with strings of red slime dappled with dark flecks. It landed in his mouth. He repositioned his patient's head and swept the blood out of the patient's mouth with his fingers. The blood had covered Dr. Musoke's hands, wrists and forearms. It had gone everywhere-all over the gurney, all over Dr. Musoke, all over the floor. The nurses in the intensive care unit couldn't believe their eyes, and they hovered in the background, not knowing quite what to do. Dr. Musoke peered down into the airway and pushed the scope deeper into the lungs. He saw that the airways were bloody.
Air rasped into the man's lungs. The patient had began to breathe again.
The patient was apparently in shock from loss of blood. He had lost so much blood that he was becoming dehydrated. The blood had come out of practically every opening in his body. There wasn't enough blood left to maintain circulation, so his heartbeat was very sluggish, and blood pressure was dropping toward zero. He needed a blood transfusion.
A nurse brought a bag of whole blood. Dr. Musoke hooked the bag on a stand an inserted the needled into the patient's arm. There was something wrong with the patient's veins; his blood poured out around the needle.
Dr. Musoke tried again, putting the needle into another place in the patient's arm and probing for the vein. Failure. More blood poured out. At every place in the patient's arm where he stuck the needle, the vein broke apart like cooked macaroni and spilled blood, and the blood ran from the punctures down the patient's arm and wouldn't coagulate. Dr. Musoke abandoned his efforts to give his patient a blood transfusion for fear that the patient would bleed to death out of the small hole in his arm."
This is one point I’m tying to make, but perhaps not getting across as I believe it is obvious. That is a shortcoming of mine, I tend to leave what I see as obvious behind.
I’m also not trying to play down the potential of this virus being airborne, particularly due to the fact of the effect it is having on those infected (as you stated previously, infecting the upper respiratory system).
I guess it would be more helpful to state that an infected individual has a very low chance of spreading the infection, AT THIS TIME from what is known, by way of our respiratory system. Most fluids are testing positive for the virus during the “showing stage” through the “recovered fully” stage in most who have been studied in previous outbreaks, but one thing that struck me in these previous studies was how viable was the virus in bodily fluids in the later stages or post infection of survivors, say 4-20 weeks and longer after testing positive for the virus. Needless to say, it would be difficult to gather such information due to the nature of the virus and its ultimate consequences.