5 Reasons America Can Calm the F#@% Down About Ebola
WARNING: ANY OF YOU COULD DIE, AT ANY MOMENT. That's because you're a mortal being; that's how it works. But you're not going to die from Ebola.
By now you've seen the headlines -- Ebola is an exotic African disease that kills in a spectacular way (sometimes by making you bleed out of every orifice) and it has come to America. But before you get out your Bane-style air mask and Ebola hammer, you just might want to consider a few reasoned points. Namely, that this is all royal bullshit:
You'd Have to Go Out of Your Way to Get It (and Would Still Probably Fail)
Go ahead and Google "how to avoid getting Ebola" and see what pops up. Chances are you'll stumble upon the CDC's Q&A outlining such life-changing preventative measures as "washing your hands" and "not touching corpses and bats."
Or corpses of bats, you sick weirdo.
Ebola is becoming the airplane disaster of contagions. The shock-and-awe value makes for television waves as huge and terrifying as tsunamis, but as infrequent as ... well ... tsunamis ... only way slower. If Ebola, measles, the common cold, and Spanish flu went toe-to-toe to see which spread the fastest, guess who wouldn't end up standing on the podium. The fucker isn't even airborne -- you could actually give a handjob to an Ebola victim and would probably live to tell about it so long as you washed your hands afterward.
"So, we gonna do this, you sick weirdo?"
Anyone Looking to Scare You Is Out for a Profit
Magazines want to sell magazines, websites want pageviews, and attention-hungry jerkoffs want attention. The world keeps spinning, and meanwhile we get headlines that look like they should be covered in apocalypse dust:
Ebola? No. Bullshit? Yes.
Terrifying. Well, unless you actually read the article, which ended up being more about government bureaucracy than bleeding out of the anus. By their own admission, Bloomberg needed to punch up the fear factor to get everyone's attention (sell copies). Hey, speaking of vile spewing out the ass:
Oh, we can think of at least one other.
How much of an opportunist monger is Donald Trump? Only half as much as Huffington Post, apparently:
They are right about something else terrible and viral-based spreading to Europe, though.
Anyone who furiously clicked on that enormous statement wound up with a subdued headline about an Ebola nurse contracting the disease herself. In other words: an unfortunate but expected job hazard made to look like the start to a disaster film, so long as no one read the fine print. It's that kind of misdirection that makes selling panic like selling bum mortgages: it's goddamned gangbusters until it sucker-punches the country ...
The Panic Is Worse Than the Disease
Now that the media has sandblasted us with fear, it's time to clamber over each other like a crowd in a theater that someone yelled "fire" in before actually lighting it on fire. While New Jersey and Massachusetts both saw scares that later turned out to be hogwash, reported Ebola cases shot up despite the verified victim count remaining at exactly one.
So, sure, you could take Trump's advice and pile-drive the economy by closing every airport from Boston to L.A. under the mantra of "better safe than sorry." Or you could remember that SARS killed only 800 people while costing $50 billion in global cash money for this same kind of fartbag sensationalism. In other words, shut off the TV and go plan that airplane trip home this Thanksgiving. Your Nana is waiting.
Just try not to think about Ebola victims when eating the sauce.
Especially when you consider ...
Containing Ebola Is a Walk in the Park (if Your Country Has a Modern Healthcare System)
It's true -- Ebola is a serious motherfucker in countries with failing economic and sanitation standards. Africa is seeing the highest Ebola epidemic in history, which is to say that it has killed more than 3,000 people so far, and will kill many more if they don't get on top of it. But, compare that to, say, the half a million Africans who die of malaria every year. Where's that headline? So, no, Ebola isn't unprecedented, even there.
Couldn't there be an outbreak in the USA, as infamously happened in 1995, in the Dustin Hoffman movie Outbreak? For one, that film completely made up their Ebola-like virus to make it airborne and mutative like the flu. Even if it did grow impossible monster Outbreak legs in Dallas, the United States and the rest of the first world has one secret weapon that Africa does not ... and it rhymes with "bunny." When the panic dust clears, this hypothetical super-Ebola would still have to get by the fuck-tonnage of experimental drugs and heavy quarantine we could afford to fight it with.
Worst-case scenario is paying Donald Sutherland to blow up the Dallas Cowboys.
Basically, the only way for Ebola to become a problem for you, the reader, is if it mutates in a way that has literally never happened. Which is to say ...
Ebola Is the Last Sickness You Should Be Worrying About
What if we were to tell you that there's a contagion out there that kills tens of thousands of Americans every year? Between 2003 and 2005 it straight-up capped the population equivalent of Green Bay, and it's called influenza, or "flu" for short. Compare that to Ebola, which has killed only 5,000 people since the first Star Wars came out.
This explosion killed more people than Ebola.
Of course, the flu kills only old people, kids, and really dumb adults -- and Ebola is some straight-up plague shit, right? Only, hey, you know what else is some plague shit? The fucking plague, which infects between 1,000 and 2,000 dupes a year, with 1,000 cases in the U.S. between 1900 and 2010. We would say that Ebola is the tortoise in this body-count race, but it turns out that tortoises fuck up way more people than Ebola could ever hope. It's a clowny, garbage disease. Fuck Ebola.
Find more from Chris at TashTag.com
