The coronavirus has not been kind to the United States. Even though the vast majority of those who have died had another underlying health condition or were very elderly, COVID-19 has robbed many families of their loved ones.
But at the end of the day, COVID is absolutely nothing compared to something like the ebola virus.
A highly contagious virus which has mainly had outbreaks so far in Africa. After several days patients experience fevers, muscle pain, headaches and sore throats, followed by vomiting, dehydration and internal and external bleeding.
In some cases you literally bleed from your eyes before dying.
Ebola virus has a fatality rate of around 50% to 90% in past outbreaks.
Now it is here in the United States.
Possible Ebola Virus in Oregon
The Oregon Health Authority (OHA) declared recently that four individuals who just came back from Guinea and the Congo in Africa may have ebola virus. It did not announce where they are currently residing in the state, although they already came back in early March.
How responsible of OHA to just let people know now that there may be ebola-positive individuals in their state. Maybe Oregon Governor Kate Brown was too busy getting transgender driver licenses for everyone and shutting down small businesses over COVID to bother warning her state residents that they’re in danger of bleeding out their eyeballs.
OHA says it’s “monitoring” the four individuals in case they develop symptoms and said “we want to make sure these individuals have the support they need to monitor their health, stay in contact with public health officials and safely get help with medical services if it comes to that.”
Meanwhile the CDC’s warning level for Guinea and Congo is at Level 3 which means all non-essential travel to these dangerous countries should be avoided. It is unclear why the four potentially ebola-positive individuals in Oregon traveled there.
Chief Medical Officer for Health Security, Preparedness and Response at the OHA Public Health Division, Dr. Richard Leman, at today's media briefing: "We're monitoring four people for Ebola who recently visited Guinea and Democratic Republic of Congo.”
— OR Health Authority (@OHAOregon) March 25, 2021
How Did This Happen?
The CDC has required every airline to give it a list and contact data for anyone coming into the US who’s been in Congo or Guinea in the past three weeks. They are given an interview after arrival in America to check if they have any symptoms.
It’s crucial to note that ebola virus can have no symptoms until up to 21 days after infection, but you can remain highly infectious that whole time.
Even being very careful and wearing a mask is often not enough to avoid ebola virus which can be easily spread in multiple ways, but has a much lower recovery rate than COVID.
Imagine shutting down an entire country over COVID and then allowing four people who could have ebola into the state of Oregon and only telling people now several weeks later. The irresponsibility of our public health officials is breathtaking, and we have to hope the four individuals are quarantining themselves instead of potentially exposing people to this deadly virus.
The protocols for reentry of possible ebola virus patients does not sound nearly strict enough. All travel to the areas of the current African outbreak obviously should already be banned.
Imagine the horror and true panic if a disease with up to 90% mortality was unleashed on this country? Everyone who thought the economy should be shut down over COVID or that it was the worst possible disease would be out of their minds with fear and the draconian measures that the government could put in place around everything from leaving the house to buying food would be so much bigger.
Not to mention that the chance of death would be much, much higher.
