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In reply to the discussion: White House Not Planning Travel Ban For Ebola Countries [View all]TorchTheWitch
(11,065 posts)time of travel? How is waiting at home acceptable isolation when anyone else that lives there is free to come and go picking up the infection from someone and then infecting the person waiting at home?
See? It isn't feasible and it wouldn't work. Mr. Duncan was infected only days before he got on the plane and from someone who lived in the same home and picked up the infection from who knows where. We don't even know if he got the infection at the time of helping to take her to the hospital. Sick as she was he could have picked it up from her some other way and at some other time once she was having symptoms. Same for her brother that got the infection, started having symptoms the same day. Had Mr. Duncan gone through this protocol of blood testing and waiting at home he still could have become infected during the waiting at home period and carried the virus with him here.
At what point of infection does blood testing show the virus anyway? Right after they're infected? A few days after they're infected? Not until symptoms start?
It is far simpler and cheaper and guaranteed to work if non-US citizens just can't travel abroad from outbreak areas until the outbreak is over. US citizens would have to be on an isolated special flight as if they were infected and put into isolation when they got here. The time of symptoms first occurring and death occur very rapidly. A non-symptomatic person could start having symptoms while in flight, and it's a very long trip. What if Mr. Duncan's symptoms started when he was in flight on a commercial airline where people are packed in like sardines and everyone has to use the same bathrooms that aren't cleaned mid-flight? It's a lucky thing that he just happened to not start having symptoms until after he was already here or everyone on that flight could be at risk.