He tried to warn you...

When the Dallas patient turned up the only thing I could hear in my brain was the following words from from an article I read early on in the outbreak -  " There is still a window of opportunity to tamp it down, but that window is closing".

I couldn't even remember who'd said it. I only remember the part about the window closing. It made my eyes grow wide at the time because I'd been watching to see if medicine would win out over human nature. I mean - your life stops for 21 days if you have to be quarantined. I think that is right at the edge of people's tolerance. They weren't even killing peoples pets at the time. Some people will not even evacuate natural disasters because they can't bring their pets.

I mean, in America you could hide out for 21 days in the house without much problem. You have TV and all the comforts. But in poor countries that means no work for almost a month. People here go to work sick all the time.

Anyway. Fun fact, and i actually hate that phrase - turns out it's that same guy that only a week ago was telling us not to panic. Yet on Sept 2, 2014 he was clearly telling us we should sort of panic.

"The Ebola epidemic is “spiraling out of control,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Tom Frieden said Tuesday.

“It is the world’s first Ebola epidemic, and it’s spiraling out of control. It’s bad now, and it’s going to get worse in the very near future. There is still a window of opportunity to tamp it down, but that window is closing. We really have to act now,” he said on “CBS This Morning.” 

Frieden recently returned from a trip to countries in West Africa affected by Ebola. He described it as a “horrific” situation but said treatment centers are increasing survival rates." READ MORE HERE.

Early on you could see this could be a big problem because the education level in Africa was pretty sparse. From time to time you'd read these articles about armed gangs raiding hospitals because they didn't believe Ebola existed. Which I thought was a self resolving problem honestly. But when they tried to capture the patients it was straight out of a movie. Dragging them back into trucks. I'll try to find the pictures. That's when you could tell people would do almost anything not to be quarantined. That is human nature. Even people on Big Brother get tired of being isolated and they have everything they need.

Also early on someone modeled how many people might get infected and it was so large I didn't even pay attention to the exact number. Then reports started filling out that the number might be 1.4 million by January. Every week the number of patients goes up by 100%. Not to mention the huge amount of medical waste that they have to figure out how to get rid of.

When they hauled that Dallas mans family out of that apartment I said - can you imagine being the property owner of that complex? You can never rent that apartment again. In California if someone dies in a house - it's a disclosure item for 5 years. If someone died from Ebola - you might as well burn that house down. You will never be able to sell it.