The average American is safe, but the choices may get ugly in the coming months.
Not the kind of distinction the U.S. craves: America now is the country with the greatest number of Ebola cases outside West Africa. With the infection reported Thursday night of a New York doctor recently returned from treating patients in Guinea, the number is four, including the late Liberian Thomas Duncan and two nurses in Dallas.
If Washington’s reason for resisting a travel ban from the hotzone countries is fear of being accused of racial profiling, politicians will be relieved by the rainbow coalition of the afflicted in the U.S.—two black, one Asian, one white.
A travel ban might not solve much but seems increasingly sensible given that a person can be infected for 10 or 20 days and not know it—and neither would airport screeners be able to detect it. Dr. Craig Spencer, the New York victim and an expert on Ebola, apparently not even suspecting that he might have been exposed, traveled on the subway and went bowling the night before developing symptoms. And yet who in New York is surprised a victim turned up in their city? Which New Yorker hasn’t already figured, if there’s one in Dallas, there’s got to be at least three here?
Read the rest here...
http://on.wsj.com/1uXFso9