Time to Mask Up?
Odds of economic harm rising fast
*"A breach in protocol..."
*Bureaucracy gone mad ...
*Changing habits ...
"Uncommon Wisdom Wrote to Me".
It says;
Healthcare workers are the front line against Ebola — and it appears the lines are broken and the road is leading nowhere fast.
Over the weekend, a Dallas nurse became the first person to acquire Ebola on American soil. She probably won’t be the last.
What can we do when even the professionals can’t protect themselves?
***
I started seeing them this weekend: an older man in Home Depot (HD), a middle-aged woman in mall, both wearing surgical masks in public. Masked people aren’t unusual on airplanes in flu season, but I hadn’t seen any on the ground since the big SARS outbreak a few years ago.
Were these folks afraid of Ebola? If so they either missed, or disbelieved, the official line that Ebola only spreads through contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person.
However, I don’t blame them for being cautious. We learned over the weekend that even medical teams with all the recommended protective gear aren’t safe. You probably heard about the Dallas nurse who is the latest confirmed case.
I think this paragraph from Bloomberg is remarkable.
The unidentified worker, who cared for Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, was infected after a “breach in protocol,“ said Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s the first time someone has contracted Ebola inside U.S. borders.
To my non-physician ears, a “breach of protocol“ occurs when you ignorantly use your soupspoon to stir your iced tea at a royal banquet. The queen may be shocked, but no one will die.
Whatever infected this nurse was more than a breach of protocol. It was confirmation that even a major U.S. hospital, which is fully aware of the threat in its midst and has every possible federal, state and local resource at its disposal, can’t keep isolated patients from infecting caregivers.
If that isn’t terrifying, I don’t know what is.
***
As you might imagine, nurses are not happy with this development. They could find themselves facing a suspected Ebola case at any moment, and many say they don’t have the training or equipment to handle the situations safely.
The repeated statements from government officials that the U.S. healthcare system can handle Ebola are getting less and less credible. A healthcare system that can’t even protect its own workers is certainly not prepared to heal its patients.
See if you can spot the flaw in this quote from The New York Times today.
The CDC said it would conduct a nationwide training conference call on Tuesday for thousands of healthcare workers to ensure they would be fully prepared to treat a patient with Ebola.
“The care of Ebola patients can be done safely, but it’s hard to do it safely,“ Dr. Frieden told reporters Sunday. “Even a single, inadvertent innocent slip can result in contamination.“
Dr. Frieden, CDC director, says “a single, inadvertent slip“ can have deadly consequences for Ebola caregivers.
To guard against this grave danger, CDC is ... inviting nurses to a conference call?
This is bureaucracy gone mad. Nurses don’t need a conference call. They need protective gear that works and training on how to use it.
It’s not exclusively a federal problem; Texas state public health authorities don’t seem to get the concept, either. More from NYT:
“So in light of this case, we’re looking at the ongoing monitoring of all healthcare workers and looking at going forward having an epidemiologist see them and more active surveillance for these individuals,“ Dr. David L. Lakey, the commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services, told reporters Sunday.
So, now that his state has seen one person die from this well-known fatal disease, and a nurse who treated the now-deceased patient acquired the same disease through some unknown breach of protocol, Dr. Lakey is “looking at“ having an epidemiologist see them.
I don’t sense much urgency here.
***
Does any of this matter to your investments? You bet it does. The odds are rising quickly that Ebola will create a major disruption for the U.S. economy.
As I said over two months ago (see Welcome to the Ebola Economy), a wider outbreak will make people change their habits. Those changes will have economic consequences.
Some changes will be minor, like people wearing facemasks. Others will be more problematic.
Can hospitals function while treating everyone with a fever as a possible Ebola carrier? Probably so — but they will function much slower than usual.
Now, multiply this for all kinds of other businesses: restaurants, grocery stores, hotels, airlines, bars, nursing homes, taxi services, hair salons.
People and their bodily fluids come into close contact in all those places. None will operate normally in the Ebola economy.
Check out other post on this blog; you would love them.
Happy Reading!
Nwadu Obiora.
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