Look, I’m 63 years old, an electronic engineer. When I took the GRE’s , 0.1% of the population got a higher score than me on the math section. This means I missed one math question on the GRE’s and 0.1% didn’t miss any. I haven’t slowed down much either. So unless you are part of that 0.1% I take your condescension as a joke.
Our discussion was about returning Dr. Brantly and the nurse to the USA for medical care. Not about securing borders, R subzero rates in Liberia or a comparison of transmission sensitivity in third world versus advanced economies with outsized medical and scientific capabilities.
You oppose letting Americans back in their country for medical care, I support it. Let’s leave it at that.
OK, so do the math. I’m also a EE, but my professional experience took me in a direction that I consult on stuff like this.
To a degree, once you become infected with something that has no known cure, and can be communicated through saliva, AND can be infect a person with as little as 1 to 10 individual virii, you have just become a different class of American.
Again, UNLESS you are bringing them back as test subjects, and they’ve effectively signed their lives away to this end, then there’s no legal or good reason to bring them home again.
AND even if they agree to be test subjects, you find a place, or establish a place, where you can do the research in situ.
If, and I say if, Guinea communicates like Reston did, where it can make its way safely through a standard HVAC system and infect other people, then this is the call you have to make.
Unfortunately, for everybody, there is very little reliable information to use in order to be able to even have an opinion about these two people. In the absence of better information, you prepare for the worst.
Patton once said, “Fixed fortifications are a testament to the folly of man.” This was never truer than for pathogens. When it takes so little pathogen to infect a person, it’s even more true.
It’s not condescension. It’s what you find among engineers especially - I’m good at one thing so I’m at least knowledgeable about others. The math is the math. The bug is in Jeddah. Jeddah’s not far from Mecca. The guy who brought it back died just 3 days after returning from SL.
That means he was symptomatic ON THE PLANE back to Jeddah. If the bug makes it to a pilgrim, and they go to Mecca, that’s the only thing you need to open this up to every country on the planet who has devout muslims in it. It’s easier to count the countries that don’t have devout muslims in it.
That your an engineer means you can calculate the safety factor of a system where the safety factors of each component of the system are in line with each other.
A system with four inline components, each with a safety factor of 99% gives you an overall system safety factor of 96%. Some folks refer to a safety factor as a reliability rating.
You think about all the inline systems that have to work in order to get an infected patient back to the US from Africa, and that is more than four.
Add to this that Writebol was infected not by patient contact - her job was cleaning equipment. So, consider all the protocol-required equipment she was using to do a routine job in fighting a pandemic-level pathogen and she was infected anyway.
Your heart is getting in the way of your head. In these types of emergencies, that is the number one way these sorts of diseases become world history making events. Sawyer went home, knowing he was infected, to see his kids.
You should know better - you’ve got the education for it.