The Boston Globe:
The national response to Ebola seems to have been patched together on the fly. Although the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it is ready to deploy specialized teams to help any hospital with an Ebola patient, the agency’s credibility has taken a significant hit in Dallas, with CDC Director Tom Frieden facing criticism over his insistence that “any hospital in the country can safely take care of Ebola.” Front-line medical workers need not just words of reassurance, but a level of confidence in their ability to execute complex protocols flawlessly. The union National Nurses United issued an urgent call for state-of-the-art protective equipment and hands-on training.
[...] But elsewhere, the Ebola crisis is also bringing out the worst sort of scaremongering and political posturing. Scott Brown, while campaigning for the US Senate in New Hampshire, gave a radio interview linking the country’s “porous” border to Ebola, saying, “I think it’s naive to think that people aren’t going to be walking through here who have those types of diseases.” The governor and attorney general of Louisiana fought plans to put the ashes of a Dallas Ebola victim’s incinerated belongings in a hazardous waste site in their state.
All this shows the need for leadership that rises above politics. President Obama canceled a trip on Wednesday to meet with the agencies involved in the US response. Although the White House expressed confidence in the CDC’s leadership, the federal government should take the bold steps needed to coordinate training and care as cases emerge.
The New York Times:
While the chance that an infected patient will show up at any particular hospital or clinic is very small, health workers should still know the basics of what to do if a patient arrives at their door. National Nurses United, the country’s largest union of nurses, says there has been almost no hands-on training, just easy-to-ignore guidance documents.
[...] At a congressional hearing on Thursday, House members asked whether the United States was adequately protected against people who might have been infected in West Africa but did not yet have symptoms. The current system relies on screening before they are allowed to fly out of West Africa and again when they reach airports in this country. So far, only one infected patient — the man who was treated in Dallas and later died — escaped detection at the airports since the epidemic was first identified seven months ago. There should be some comfort in knowing that that part of the system is working.
And here's a Gannett editorial that pretty much sums up the situation
on the media side of things:
It turns out that Ebola is spreading like wildfire. At least among the cable news networks.
They have all caught the Ebola bug and are now transmitting the fear it engenders to millions of Americans. Fox, CNN, MSNBC are all engaged in saturation coverage of this latest portent of the apocalypse.
To ramp up the fear in order to carve out higher ratings for themselves, they need to divest themselves of certain things: proportionality, for one, and perspective, for another. [...] Surely, all necessary precautions should be taken to prevent the spread of the virus in America. But let's all get a grip here.
Much more on this and the day's other top stories below the fold.
The Washington Post:
Refutation of these memes may be a lost cause, but we’ll try anyway. In brief: Ebola is no one’s “fault.” The United States and other nations should have responded far sooner to the outbreak in West Africa. The CDC could have done a better job managing the situation in Dallas, where exposure to a Liberian patient apparently resulted in the infection of at least two nurses. Yet this is an unprecedented challenge for the American health-care system, and everyone involved — from the president to front-line health-care workers — is acting in good faith and, necessarily, learning on the job.
The Times-Union:
[J]ust as it would be a mistake to minimize the threat of Ebola, it would be a mistake to inflate it, a path that we are in danger of going down, especially in the charged climate of a political campaign season. Blowing this out of proportion for political purposes has the potential to do as much harm as ignoring the virus, sending those dealing with the crisis into a defensive mode that will likely lead them to downplay threats, defend errors instead of fixing them, or shut down the flow of information that is vital to preventing the kinds of misinformation, speculation and panic that flourishes in a vacuum.
The Charleston Daily Mail:
As epidemics go, this is a small but terrifying one.
In the United States — population 315 million people — we have suffered one Ebola death.
But network TV and the cable news outlets have given that one death Kardashian attention. Many people are panicked. The only thing they have is Ebola hysteria — hysterbola.
From the editors over at
The Alabama Press-Register too:
As contagious as Ebola is, there's something even more contagious, and that's fear of Ebola. Even in Alabama - where 12 people have been tested, and were negative - hospitals and officials, including Gov. Robert Bentley, are working to tamp down anxiety.
[...] Recognizing the low risk in Alabama, meanwhile, doesn't ignore the suffering of many in Ebola-stricken areas of the world. Their plight is heartbreaking and deserves our immediate help. However, we rank-and-file Alabamians can actually protect our health more effectively if we ignore Ebola and put down our cell phones when we drive.
Switching topics,
Paul Begala looks at "when the Rick hits the fan":
Once more, as I often do, I find myself wishing for the late, great Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. It was he who said, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." But it was Florida Gov. Rick Scott who brought Thompson's maxim to life Wednesday. In fact, Gov. Scott brought it to the stage of a televised debate. [...] What Gov. Scott demonstrated to the world is that, beneath that creepy exterior is an even more creepy psyche. A guy who is so deeply weird, so twisted and nutty that he would boycott a debate at the last second because his opponent had a small electric fan beneath his podium to keep him cool. Granted, the fan was a violation of the rules, but who cares?
Steve Bousquet, Amy Sherman and Marc Caputo add their take and a timeline of events:
cott debate adviser Brett O’Donnell found WFOR news director Liz Roldan and started yelling about the fan. Dan Gelber, Crist’s debate point man, insisted the fan would stay.
Roldan, who declined to comment for this story, stood firm.
Finally,
Ed Kilgore dives into Nate Silver's latest analysis on polling bias:
It’s a bit of a shock to read Nate’s data and realize that Senate polling averages in the last three weeks of the campaign have been off by more than 3% four times since 1990: twice showing “bias” towards Democrats (1994 and 2002) and twice towards Republicans (1998 and 2012). [...] In passing, Nate also reminds us of election theories you still hear but that have been largely discredited: the Incumbent Rule (undecideds break towards challengers); the Bradley Effect (polls overestimate the vote of African-American candidates); and the Generic Ballot Tilt (the generic congressional ballot has a built-in Democratic bias).
But the biggest takeaway is that very small changes in the national climate could have profound effects
Here's the link to Silver's piece. It's a fascinating read.