The Ebola story to talk about right now in the United States is in Dallas, at a hospital called Texas Health Presbyterian, a man named Thomas Duncan, in critical condition after coming down with the Ebola virus after arriving in that city from Liberia a couple of weeks ago.
They monitor him closely there even as his condition worsens, and monitor as many as 50 people with whom he may have come in contact, and what you wonder — because how can you not? — would the reaction have been if it had been Columbia Presbyterian after somebody like Thomas Duncan had been moving around this city for a few days.
That is why everyone onboard United Airlines Flight 998, Brussels to Newark, Saturday afternoon, a passenger displaying Ebola-like symptoms — which means bad flulike symptoms in flu season — had to be thinking while they were briefly quarantined on that plane that perhaps Ebola had arrived from the other side of the world to ours.
This doesn’t mean that there should be some sort of full-blown panic, especially with the airlines, or that we are now supposed to fear this new virus the way the world once feared smallpox. But what is abundantly clear, despite what all the experts want you to believe — especially the ones who have gone running to television to reassure everyone — is that doctors and scientists clearly don’t know what they don’t know about Ebola.
At the same time we’re reminded, in a dangerous world, that for all our fears about terror coming to our city again or to our country, that real terror is still a diagnosis of cancer, because that is terror that comes right to your house. We are reminded how often defenseless we are against nature, and against disease.
Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was on “Meet the Press” on Sunday telling a television audience that there is nothing to be worried about.
“Well, it’s really understandable that people are scared,” Frieden said. “It’s a deadly virus. But you have to go back to basics. The bottom line here is we know how to stop it. It’s not going to spread widely in the U.S. for two basic reasons: We can do infection control in hospitals and we can do public health interventions that stop it in its tracks.
“We do that by identifying every possible contact, monitoring them for 21 days, and if they get any symptoms, isolating and monitoring them as well. That’s how you stop Ebola.”
All of which makes perfect sense until you remember that Thomas Duncan got on a plane with Ebola and flew to Dallas and did everything except attend his first Cowboys football game before he ended up in the hospital. Again: You wonder what the reaction would be if he had been riding around on the 4 train for a long weekend, or the E or the F, and then Metro-North?
If it was New York for Duncan, you wonder how many people they would be monitoring, even as the doctors and the experts keep telling us, and with great certainty, that the only way Ebola can be transmitted is through bodily fluids, and not through the air.
Everyone of a certain age remembers the paranoia when AIDS became the kind of epidemic it became in the gay community in the 1980s; how late education came to that disease, and common sense, back when people began to fear that a kiss could somehow kill you. Even in 1991, when Magic Johnson called a news conference to announce he was HIV-positive, people thought he was announcing some kind of death sentence.
John Moore/Getty Images A health worker in protective clothing holds a child suspected of having Ebola in the MSF treatment center on Sunday. The girl and her mother, showing symptoms of the deadly disease, were awaiting test results for the virus.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images A member of the Cleaning Guys Haz Mat clean up company takes a barrel of items out of the apartment where Ebola patient Thomas Duncan was staying before being admitted to a hospital on Sunday in Dallas.
JIM YOUNG/REUTERS A worker in hazardous material suit is sprayed down by a co-worker after coming out of an apartment unit where a man diagnosed with the Ebola virus was staying in Dallas on Sunday.
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Of course the Ebola virus is not that. It still took so long and too many lives for the drug cocktails that would stop AIDS from being a death sentence became available. Now there are promising vaccines for Ebola being tested, one called ZMapp. But that drug isn’t available to Thomas Duncan because Mapp Biopharmaceutical, which makes the drug, has run out of supplies, at least for now.
And you wonder how long it would take, even if the supplies were readily available for ZMapp or an equivalent, for the drug to make it to the poor of Liberia. You worry at the same time what happens, because you always have to, when drug companies hold the power over life and death.
For now we watch at a distance as Thomas Duncan fights for his life at Texas Health Presbyterian, and hope he didn’t infect somebody else; wait to see how the airlines are going to handle the threat of Ebola at the same time.
Duncan has Ebola. It turns out that passenger on United 998 does not. But you know who both of them are? They’re the sick guy we’ve all sat next to on an airplane at least once in our lives. For now, a new kind of terror at 35,000 feet.
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