Christie isn't up for reelection but Cuomo is

[AndreaCG]

I was planning to hold my nose and vote for him simply because he's not a republican. But then he comes out with this hysterical reaction to the Ebola situation. Now I'm either going to leave the line blank or vote Green. I can't wait to see how this affects the polling.

[customerserviceguy]

1. Go ahead

I figure that for every third party protest vote in the NYC area, Cuomo picks up one vote from upstate who admires his resolve to protect the people of the state.

As long as we don't end up with ASStorino, it's fine with me.

[AndreaCG]

4. Well I'll grant you the doctor who actually HAS ebola

Is being treated in a hospital properly. But the NJ nurse who shows NO symptoms including a normal temperature when using an oral thermometer, which is more accurate than the forehead one, is in quarters which the ACLU would denounce for convicted felons. Cuomo is not denouncing this and guaranteeing that any asymptomatic health care worker quarantined in NYS will be in a hospital situation. Furthermore, both medical experts and the federal government say automatic quarantine is unnecessary, given that the disease is only contagious once the person shows symptoms like a high fever. Even then, it's not airborne but requires contact with bodily fluids. Look at Duncan's family, who lived with him after he showed symptoms for several days. None of them contracted Ebola. So yes, I think Cuomo's quarantine is overreacting, while Christie is a heartless jerk for allowing the nurse to live in such squalid conditions.

[hedgehog]

5. What are the governors going to do if she develops pneumonia from wearing paper clothes

in a tent in late October and/or develops a stomach flu from having no proper washing facilities?

[customerserviceguy]

6. While I support the quarantine

I'm appalled at the conditions under which they are being carried out. I hope that something much more comfortable and dignified is found for the next health worker flying in from West Africa.

I would imagine that they are trying to fly into states without quarantine, let's see how that works out.

[Fred Sanders]

2. Anti-science politicians do not deserve to be called liberal, or progressive and certainly not

elected to spread their pandering to hysteria.

[etherealtruth]

3. Christie still has dreams of being POTUS

I have no doubt that he will use this to illustrate that he is "strong and decisive" .... he strongly and decisively decided to bow to uninformed pressure vs science and expertise.

These decisions in NY, NJ, and IL are horrifying and are denying people (at this point a person) basic civil and human rights.

[customerserviceguy]

8. Tell me something

All this notifying of anyone who's been within close range of an Ebola carrier, and all this decontamination of the places where those folks have been, which we see nightly on the NYC news, is that the result of uninformed pressure, too?

I mean, if this disease is so hard to catch, then why stir up panic and fear by doing those things? Do you see how words and actions are not corresponding to each other here?

[etherealtruth]

9. Actually, yes to much of it

The decontamination of public places (in the NY case, definitely) where the person was prior to the development of symptoms ....most definitely was implemented to allay public fears. Contacting people that a person has been in contact with is important to determine the extent of that contact ... ie did Dr. Spencer and his fiance have sex ...? Did Doctor Spencer develop diarrhea at a friends house?... and determine an actual risk level is important.

I don't take much of what I see on the nightly news as information (although I will admit, what i have seen today has been accurate and not fear mongering). I rely on my own education and depend heavily on the work of public health experts, epidemiologists, virologists, etc that provide very accurate up to date information.

I lived and worked through the AIDS crisis and recognize much of the ignorance, fear-mongering and hysteria that surrounded patients in the early days of AIDS. Knowledge of infection control and a basic understanding of infectious disease is important. Public policy that reflects the science and is not driven by public fears and perception is what is needed.

[customerserviceguy]

11. Thank you for your civil response

I haven't seen a lot of them in the last couple of days to my postings. I do respect your training and experience, but that gives you a plateau to look down from on the facts. Most people don't have anywhere near your understanding of the known facts about this disease.

Would you have contacted the hundreds of people who flew on the aircraft that Amber Vinson was on, even though she had no symptoms, and wasn't even on board three of the flights that happened before the aircraft was disinfected?

Another good reason to keep the quarantine procedure away from American cities is that they are like red meat for local news crews. If you had a nice resort on an island someplace, with good food, comfortable clothing and bedding, TV and Internet, you wouldn't have the situation that Nurse Hickox finds herself in today. The conditions of her quarantine are yet another fumble in the handling of this whole situation.

One thing that is radically different between the AIDS crisis of thirty years ago and the Ebola crisis of today is communication, and I don't mean the positive type. Back then, we didn't have three 24/7 'news' channels to fill with bombastic headlines and alerts in the crawls at the bottom of the screen, desperately vying for attention lest we turn the channel to one of the other two networks. Add to that the Internet, which allows misinformation to travel at the speed of light.

Thirty years ago, one got misinformation about AIDS from around the office water cooler, over the back fence, and in letters that took a day or more to reach people. Today, in the blink of an eye, any one of us can massively misinform dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of people. It is this environment that the 'abundance of caution' takes on possibly grotesque forms.

If I went to a service station, and saw a fuel spill, would I stay based on the attendant's "It's OK, sir, routine spill here," or would I quickly get out of there as I saw him frantically cleaning up the mess, like he was trying to prevent a fire? You have the authorities doing things that don't square up with the soothing words they're muttering. The already observed fumbles in this situation don't give lay people an awful lot of confidence.

[Kalidurga]

7. Normally I would try to talk a person with your position down.

But, if I was in the same situation I would vote Green as well.

[KMOD]

10. I'm very tempted to write-in Kaci Hickox