In Africa, Ebola is killing hundreds of people per week. Most of the people dying travel short distances to buy groceries, and if they are sick, they might not walk at all. There might be a high level of interaction between other people because many families are living very close together and that allows the disease spread more easily. But in Africa, long distance travel is not the norm.
We have had one person with Embola get into the US and the first thing that happen was that he got sent home from the emergency ward with some medications. Why?? Because he had no health insurance. Note though, he was seen by a doctor, the ER process works, but without insurance, he would have been competing for a hospital bed with someone sicker or in worse shape that could pay.
Now let’s look at reality in this country. We don’t just live and operate in a 5 mile area like in Africa. We have had one person successfully gain entrance to the country with Ebola. One of the two infected nurses that treated him, made a trip to Detroit and back to Dallas. One person that handled embola blood samples is even on a cruise trip in the Caribbean. Common sense suggests that to control a disease of this magnitude, is very easy when, most people don’t have the ability to move great distances. Once they have mobility, everyone has the potential for exposure.
If we were to eliminate flights to Africa, many suggest that it would stop nothing. I argue that it would slow them down. It could take a person 10 to 15 days to make it to an airport where they could have access to regular means of travel. So in most cases, the disease would be spotted before it went further. That is pretty much the case with immigration from Mexico, it takes about a month to get from Panama to the border into the US, and so there would not be much of a worry about Ebola infections.
The real problem that is severely understated is the fact that in the United States, we have high mobility. Do we have the resources to control several outbreaks? When you come to the realization that the resources are not there, then you understand why the battle has to be fought in Africa. We have to fix the problem there first, or we are at risk at home on a higher level. It won’t spread from village to village in this country, but rather hop city to city, like San Francisco to New York.
Our country’s emergency rooms are closing in droves, they can’t pay their bills. We even had one ER unit that was forced to stay open and was going broke slowly. All it took was for one person to die in their waiting room and the government shut them down for gross incompetence; “Please Brer Bear, don’t throw me in the briar patch.” They were not allowed to go out of business, because they served the public, but incompetence set them free. Go figure!
At the Pentagon the other day, someone threw-up in the parking lot and they called for a hazmat team. So examine our first responders. Their first question is “Do you have insurance?” Their second question is “Have you been to Africa or Dallas in the last 3 weeks?” At that point, the health care provider might be asking themselves, “Shouldn’t I be wearing some protective clothing?”
Ebola in the United States has only hit three visibly traceable people. What happens if it was to infect part of our invisible economy, a drug addict or hooker? A 6 to 8 hour wait, in an emergency waiting room, kind of turns ER into an incubation Day Care Center for Embola. What if the person arrives to ER unconscious? I guess if you are having a heart attack you don’t have to wait 8 hrs, but everyone else does. After one exhausting 6 hour visit there 30 years ago, my next visit was to Urgent Care. I showed them a credit card and saw a doctor in 5 minutes.
In this country, we have a war on who is entitled to health care and how will it be paid for. The government pays pitifully little for uninsured ER procedures, reducing the hospitals to steal from their insurance paying customers. Our government is great at appointing people to oversee a problem and issuing directives, but short on funds to really implement any sort of action.
The real worry could be a country like India with a very concentrated population, with many very affluent people traveling to or living abroad in other countries.
Ebola could change our way of life. If you think you have it, you can go sit with a bunch of others in ER for 6 hours who have some sort of stomach flu. The hospital’s employee dress code with people in orange space suits might make you wonder a bit, but then you’d realize that it’s kind of hard to throw up wearing one of those suits, so it wouldn't do you much good to be wearing one. Of course, ABC reports that the Dallas hospital that had the first case now resembles a ghost town. It’s kind of vacant. The good news, there is no wait time at that emergency room, just come on down.
Thousands die in Africa every week and one of them made it stateside. Presently three schools are closed in Cleveland and a commercial airplane has been taken out of service, so they can be decontaminated. ABC reported that “There are four hospitals with bio containment facilities in the United States, and they have 11 beds that can be used at any one time for Ebola patients,”--- and four of them are in use.
An orange hazmat suit, looks like the ideal Halloween costume, the color fits as does the symbolism it represents. 8 billion people in the world and Embola could kill 5.7 billion of them if we drag our feet on this. Congress with it's excessive hubris, won't do much, its an election year and an incubation period of 21 days is too short an interval to have a public opinion on. I’m just hoping the disease is more partial to Democrats who are for everything.
Remember one thing, the problem will go away if we do nothing. And when you think about it, oddly that's correct, if we are not around, the problem ceases to exist.
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Reality Vs Perception
People protesting in the streets of Turkey demanding that the government do something about ISIS. Ever notice that protestors don’t carry guns and they are all in their 20’s. They really don’t want to fight in a war either, let someone else die for the cause. I guess that’s why we draft people into the military, they don’t want to go voluntarily.
Americans think that people that vote in other countries have Democracy. How does a bottle of purple ink to dip your finger even suggest an aura of Democracy?
Minimum wage, what is it? It is a wage they have to pay per hour for a job that can’t be done in a foreign country. Hamburger flipper comes to mind. How many more do we need? The US could become more like Spain, where laborers are private contractors. As an independent contractor, you would get paid a commission on the number of hamburgers you sold. You would be responsible for Social Security, health care and taxes. There is no minimum wage for contractors. How many hotel rooms can you clean at $10 per room? At $5 per room????
Looking to the wars being fought in the Middle East, where does all the money come from to purchase the explosives, bullets and bombs that are being used? An AK-47 now sells for $2,100, a grenade launcher for $2,000 and grenades for $500; think about it when you fill up your car at a gas station, the money comes from oil. Minimum wage in Syria is probably about 10 cents an hour. So we know who is not buying them; finding an AK-47 would be the equivalent of winning the lottery over there. When you run out of money, you run out of ammunition, and you lose; wars are expensive. When you see many soldiers fire off 20 rounds into the air, you realize the mentality of these warriors—idiots. Bullets are not free.
People all over the world are in to protesting. It is painless and appears to have a semblance of results. What people don’t realize is that organizations like ISIS with a couple of thousand followers can threaten and intimidate millions of people. They could run out of money; logistic concepts are an unknown concept to religious zealots. But don’t fool yourself, these people will kill innocent relatives to impose their will. Your son or daughter is more precious to you than your political beliefs and that is the medium they work within: the fear of loss.
Here in the US, absurdity is being mixed with reality with varying results. With the new diet pills, if you lose too much weight, only take them every other day. After having a hip replacement you can go mountain climbing, more likely, you might want to throw away your aluminum walker. The pill ads for Viagra show a middle age trim couple. Reality is a wife that has put on 40 pounds and thinks he husband should have outgrown sex long ago; don’t get too excited, those 50 pills could take you a half century years to use up— plus the threat of 4 hours of sex might make you appear to be some sort of sex fanatic that needs to be put down. Can you imagine the dialogue at breakfast the next morning? “Honey if you take one more of those pills, we are through.” Of course, your response, “I felt like I was about to have a cerebral hemorrhage”— might make her consider one more encounter.
The reality, we have a bunch of old farts in Congress trying to run our country, times have changed and left them behind, of course, they are the last to realize it.
We need some young leadership that will go into the Middle East and kick some ass. IMHO forget health care, if you can’t pay for it, you don’t need it. This country was not built to provide what you can’t afford to pay for. Spending a million dollars on a premature baby is noble, but that amount of money would pay for a hell of a lot of new infrastructure for water delivery in Los Angeles. Of course the idea that we must choose between a new life and old plumbing is a real tear jerker, but Amerika needs to step up and address the real issues. The premise that we can have it all, is fiction. It's a little like getting married so you can pimp out your wife to your buddies to make the house payment, it works for all the wrong reasons (until the wife catches on). We will pay for this mess, but hey that's a thousand years from now--maybe, maybe not.
Americans think that people that vote in other countries have Democracy. How does a bottle of purple ink to dip your finger even suggest an aura of Democracy?
Minimum wage, what is it? It is a wage they have to pay per hour for a job that can’t be done in a foreign country. Hamburger flipper comes to mind. How many more do we need? The US could become more like Spain, where laborers are private contractors. As an independent contractor, you would get paid a commission on the number of hamburgers you sold. You would be responsible for Social Security, health care and taxes. There is no minimum wage for contractors. How many hotel rooms can you clean at $10 per room? At $5 per room????
Looking to the wars being fought in the Middle East, where does all the money come from to purchase the explosives, bullets and bombs that are being used? An AK-47 now sells for $2,100, a grenade launcher for $2,000 and grenades for $500; think about it when you fill up your car at a gas station, the money comes from oil. Minimum wage in Syria is probably about 10 cents an hour. So we know who is not buying them; finding an AK-47 would be the equivalent of winning the lottery over there. When you run out of money, you run out of ammunition, and you lose; wars are expensive. When you see many soldiers fire off 20 rounds into the air, you realize the mentality of these warriors—idiots. Bullets are not free.
People all over the world are in to protesting. It is painless and appears to have a semblance of results. What people don’t realize is that organizations like ISIS with a couple of thousand followers can threaten and intimidate millions of people. They could run out of money; logistic concepts are an unknown concept to religious zealots. But don’t fool yourself, these people will kill innocent relatives to impose their will. Your son or daughter is more precious to you than your political beliefs and that is the medium they work within: the fear of loss.
Here in the US, absurdity is being mixed with reality with varying results. With the new diet pills, if you lose too much weight, only take them every other day. After having a hip replacement you can go mountain climbing, more likely, you might want to throw away your aluminum walker. The pill ads for Viagra show a middle age trim couple. Reality is a wife that has put on 40 pounds and thinks he husband should have outgrown sex long ago; don’t get too excited, those 50 pills could take you a half century years to use up— plus the threat of 4 hours of sex might make you appear to be some sort of sex fanatic that needs to be put down. Can you imagine the dialogue at breakfast the next morning? “Honey if you take one more of those pills, we are through.” Of course, your response, “I felt like I was about to have a cerebral hemorrhage”— might make her consider one more encounter.
The reality, we have a bunch of old farts in Congress trying to run our country, times have changed and left them behind, of course, they are the last to realize it.
We need some young leadership that will go into the Middle East and kick some ass. IMHO forget health care, if you can’t pay for it, you don’t need it. This country was not built to provide what you can’t afford to pay for. Spending a million dollars on a premature baby is noble, but that amount of money would pay for a hell of a lot of new infrastructure for water delivery in Los Angeles. Of course the idea that we must choose between a new life and old plumbing is a real tear jerker, but Amerika needs to step up and address the real issues. The premise that we can have it all, is fiction. It's a little like getting married so you can pimp out your wife to your buddies to make the house payment, it works for all the wrong reasons (until the wife catches on). We will pay for this mess, but hey that's a thousand years from now--maybe, maybe not.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)