This is pretty much exactly what they did. The trouble is there aren’t people on the place qualified to ask the right questions and determine the correct course of action. And if you’re job is “go onto a plane and figure out if this guy has Ebola”, you wear a hazmat suit.
I think “are you serious?” is the first question to ask, with answer which even a non-specialist should be able to understand.
Also, in the age of cellphones and radio, you do not have to have the knowledgeable people on board - on the phone it is enough.
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How well we’ve been trained to accept extreme overreactions in the name of security theater. Look at the tone of the conversation. So many people accepting that “well, they had to do SOMETHING” even if they think maybe it was a little bit much, to those who argue that it was completely the right thing.
Can you imagine this happening in a train, or on a bus, or on a ship, or hell, in a crowded sports arena or theater or any other place with people crammed in together? No. It’d be handled totally differently and anyone that approached it like the airports do would be ridiculed and accused of starting a panic.
That we accept any kind of nonsense on the planes, that we take the lesson “oh, these are the things you can’t say or do lest your provoke an extreme overreaction.” (And it’s not just the stupid idiot jokes kind of thing. That attitude has permeated to everything, including objecting to illegal actions by the TSA, or etc, etc, etc)
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quite right, but that would require common sense and critical thinking skills. I afraid those qualities aren’t as well distributed as we might like.
I agree…the security theater is strictly a non-humor venue alas. Buffoonery does not like to be upstaged.
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Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
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The public health workers are just doing their job. The flight attendant is a jackass, but some people always will be.
What makes this terrifying is how everyone else reacts. The flight attendant acknowledges there’s no reason for her to have created this situation, but then flips the script and says it’s the passenger’s fault somehow, and everyone else just bends over for that, even booing the scapegoat as he’s led away.
It doesn’t get said enough, but the blame for authoritarianism lies squarely with people like the passengers on this plane, who side with authority when it’s openly wrong. Yeah, the stakes were trivial this time, but these little acts of cowardice are the bricks from which oppressive regimes are built, and you don’t get to pretend that the first bricks are any less important than the last.
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Number of people did does mean we should be putting a lot more effort into managing flu and malaria /in general/ than into developing treatments for rare diseases like ebola.
However, during the largest-ever (yet still regional) outbreak of a disease with very high lethality, I think it is quite reasonable to be (not quite this, but almost) cautious. It is certainly unlikely ebola will spread in the US the way it has in parts of Africa, because we have a much better infrastructure (yes, really, even in the US) and a culture willing to use it.
Remember, the 1918 flu pandemic killed 3%-5% of the world population, which was 10%-20% of those infected. Ebola still kills at several times that rate, and if it ever did evolve to become more readily infectious - well, I’d rather my flight attendants err on the side of assuming it could be real and following these guidelines]1 than assuming the opposite.
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“Hi, Jack!”
“Hey! What? What did I say?”
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There is an outbreak of Ebola in Africa. It is sensible to screen passengers in transit from Africa for known symptoms of Ebola. It is not accordingly prudent to escort everyone who fucking sneezes on a plane back on land with a team of movie extras.
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That’s a good question… an antonym for truthiness? You could just say falsiness? I don’t know… we should crowdsource that shit!
Pathogens also generally evolve to be less lethal over time. Ebola may be harsh but the humble rhinoviruses are way more successful. It’s an evolutionary disadvantage to kill your host in a short time from infection.
I think it was typhus or cholera where this behavior was observed, that the first infections are harsh and often lethal while over the course of the epidemy the pathogen mellows out as the more aggressive sub-strains are selected against, as a host killed in short time can infect fewer other hosts.
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If someone makes a joke about having a bomb while waiting to get on the plane, It’s quite likely they will be punished. It’s not very likely that the punishment will come in the form of a fully equipped bomb squad surround them and disassembling everything they happen to be carrying.
But then, we’ve grown accustomed to the no-fly list being used to punish people with unpopular hobbies, ideas, or colors of skin. This image of hazmat suited avengers could well symbolize the funhouse mirror that once was called public discourse.
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You’re talking about giving the possibly present ebola virus an extra five minutes to spread, right? Acceptable to me.
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Partyvanned.
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