Ebola: The Incompetence is Breathtaking

I’m having a hard time digesting news about Ebola, particularly in the US. Just how incompetent can everybody be?

• There seems little to no training for nurses for how to stay safe. What? Here’s one article, I’ve seen many.
• Update Oct-16: The second infected nurse in Texas decided to fly around, not once, but twice, with elevated temperature after caring for an Ebola patient. Just what understanding about infections does one have to have so one can be a nurse? Turns out it the nurse had the correct understanding, but the CDC didn’t, which is far worse!
• This guy did his homework about “airborne” vs non-airborne. Why doesn’t the CDC seem to pay attention? Note the word “outdated” — which is exactly how all that talk about airborne sounds to my engineering ears.
• And obviously nobody understands exponential growth at all. In exponential growth, it really doesn’t matter how many cases there are right now, the only thing that matters is the exponent, and it doesn’t look good. Before you say “but that’s in Africa”, in Texas we currently have one original patient (who died) and two infected nurses. Same rate!
• Don’t you get that whatever outrageous measure you implement today would have to be twice as outrageous 3 weeks from now to have the same effect? And 16 times as outrageous 3 months from now! The way to kill the economy and do all sorts of other awful things is to wait!

It’s not like nobody knows how this is supposed to work. Even Tom Clancy must have written more in his book about how to deal with it, than some of those “professionals” seem to know.