Ebola has made its way to the U.S. Two cases have emerged on American soil thus far. Two nurses who helped treat Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian man visiting family in Dallas who died of the disease on Oct. 8, have also contracted the disease. Since then, pundits, talking heads, and even government officials, such as former New York Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCaughey, who fear a national epidemic have taken to television, op-ed columns, and Fox News studios to ask a depressingly common question: “What about the risks to Americans?”
The reality—banal, unsexy, and certainly not good TV—is that there aren’t many. The CDC, President Obama, and medical officials have repeatedly assured Americans that the risk of widespread infection in the U.S. is slim. Nevertheless, it is our national and international duty to both support humanitarian efforts to halt Ebola’s spread abroad and to properly contextualize the problem. Panicking or advocating rash action, such as cutting off transportation and trade to affected countries, helps no one—least of all those nations in which Ebola currently runs rampant.
The biggest facilitator of Ebola’s spread is poor medical infrastructure. In Liberia and Sierra Leone, Ebola has wreaked havoc since its outbreak in December 2013. Outside hospitals in Monrovia, Liberia’s capital, those affected wait to be admitted into overflowing treatment centers that are only caring for 18 percent of patients. People with malaria, cholera, and HIV—all endemic to the region—are being left to die because Ebola patients have been prioritized. Across West Africa, entire cities are shutting down, as businesses close for lack of revenue, employees refuse to go to work, and children no longer attend school.
The virus’s devastation is inversely proportional to affected countries’ level of infrastructure. Despite the fact that Nigeria is fighting an internal war against Islamist militants, its GDP per capita is about 5 percent that of the U.S.’s, and nearly half of its population lives below the national poverty line, it has been able to control Ebola’s spread within its borders because of its more advanced infrastructure. If Nigeria is able to hold off Ebola, the U.S.—a country with vast medical resources and separated from Africa by the Atlantic Ocean—has little to worry about.
The point is that Ebola is hardly a threat to the U.S. While concern is certainly justified to a point, that concern is best directed outward toward the overseas communities suffering from the outbreak. As of last month, Georgetown students are no strangers to the fear that incidences of contagious disease can generate. Our campus’ tragic experience with meningitis demonstrated, however, that forbearance is better at containing both diseases and the fear they provoke than panic. The climate of fear pundits have the power to stoke, though, does nothing but distract from Ebola’s devastating magnitude.
What does the last sentence mean?