Instead of banning travel from West Africe -

[hedgehog]

how about handing a red card to anyone who has been there? If they start to develop symptoms and show up at an ER, they could show the red card and maybe get placed in isolation and given treatment instead of being sent home.

[ZombieHorde]

1. I like where you're going with this, but I don't think it would work well.

Imagine you're an ER doctor, and I come to you and say that I have some Ebola symptoms and I just came back from West Africa. When you ask for my red card, I tell that it was stolen or lost or any other excuse for not having a red card. What do you do? Send me on my way, or treat me as if I may have Ebola? If you erred on the side of caution, then the cards don't mean anything, but if you error on the side of costs and time, some people with Ebola may slip through the cracks.

[Lee-Lee]

2. You have to expect people will do the right thing

So many won't.

Of course getting on airplanes for almost 24 hours and flying across the globe after you had direct contact with a person in the very last stages of ebola, and not admitting the contact when asked, isn't exactly behaving in a responsible manner either.

[pampango]

3. Because it's more satisfying to build walls to keep a problem away from me than it is

to deal with the problem at its source. The right, in particular but not solely, is a big proponent of the "build a wall to keep the suffering away from me" strategy.

[MineralMan]

4. Maybe a mandatory yellow arm band. That way, people could shun

them in public, too. Yeah...that's the ticket.

In the Twin Cities of MN, we have about 20,000 or so Liberian immigrants living here. They're already experiencing issues from this Ebola scare, as are the immigrants from places like Somalia, who come from an area nowhere near the outbreak in Africa. They're all easily identified, you know. No armbands needed. They're black and speak with an accent.

Ugh!

[Bluenorthwest]

5. In the year 2010, the US finally lifted the pointless, discriminatory, fear based travel ban on all

people with HIV. Two decades we denied entry to such visitors. For no good reason at all. It was put in place during the panic portion of the mainstream reaction to the virus and then it was just left there, long after all the science told us how useless such a ban was and how harmful it really was. GW Bush got the ball rolling to end it, Obama signed it. 20 years.

[hedgehog]

6. A very good reason for us to follow the science today and oppose any such travel bans.

My OP reflects my dark sense of humor and may appear light-hearted. As far as I know, Mr Duncan had no symptoms and no reason to believe he was carrying Ebola when he arrived in Dallas to see his son and girl friend. When he did get sick and go to a hospital, he was sent hoe from the ER with a script for antibiotics. It is my belief*that he might be alive today if he had received prompt treatment. Certainly, fewer people would have been exposed had he been promptly diagnosed and isolated.

I am not the only poster here to suspect he was hustled out of the ER because he was seen as a poor, black, immigrant. My OP shoud have been heavily labelled as


(* my belief, not confirmed fact)