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Kaci Hickox’s case is an interesting one. Hickox is a nurse who just spent a month in Sierra Leone’s Ebola forefront with Médecins Sans Frontières. Upon her return into Newark’s Liberty International Airport, she was questioned and detained, once it was ascertained she’d been in West Africa.
She’s claiming her civil rights have been violated.
But I think the precedent here is clear: In public health emergency situations, the government has the right – in fact, I would say the obligation – to take measures to prevent the transmission of a dangerous and communicable disease.
Fuckups in the process, sure. Health officials weren’t involved in the temperature monitoring process, and so they took Hickox’s temperature with a forehead scanner. Since she was upset and flushed, her skin temperature was higher than her core temperature, which raised alarms.
Hickox’s main complaints seem to be that her various interrogators didn’t introduce themselves properly and that the female officer who took her temp with the scanner acted “smug” when she announced Hickox had a temperature of 101.
Big fucking deal.
I mean, I get it. You sacrifice a month of your life caring for the destitute and hopeless, at the very least, you’re expecting some kind of thank you. A parade would be nice, too.
But, of course, this is a choice you made. Nobody compelled your heroism, and presumably it has its own rewards, or you wouldn’t have done it.
Hickox was eventually carted off – unnecessarily – to a hospital and when subsequent tests proved she doesn’t have Ebola, she was told she’d be in quarantine for the next 21 days.
She’s pissed.
I get that, too. She’d rather be out bowling in Williamsburg.
Presumably, she’s being quarantined at the behest of the State of New Jersey, and yes, their response here was disorganized to say the least. This is what happens the first time a particular protocol is implemented. If she were the hundredth health care professional flying in from West Africa being treated like this, I’d say she had grounds to whine. But she wasn’t.
And having witnessed the devastation first-hand for herself, I’m really shocked that she doesn’t seem to understand why drastic measures are being used to contain this disease threat. Does she think being a pretty white girl is enough to protect her against Ebola? The hipster doc got it. Chances are he didn’t double glove and contaminated himself by touching his own hair while he was untying his face mask. I’ve been over this in my own mind 1,000 times -- those sterile isolation get-ups are extraordinarily hard to take off without breach. In most cases, of course, when you use these get-ups, you’re protecting the patient against your microorganisms. Breaching protocol is a lapse of professionalism, but since it’s not going to endanger you, one has to assume it happens from time to time, and no one reports it. With Ebola, on the other hand, you’re gowning up to protect yourself, and breaches are life-threatening.
Yeah. They’re making it up as they go. It doesn’t run like clockwork yet. Maybe it never will. I don’t know. But there’s some irony here that Hickox put her own life at risk to prevent an epidemic, but doesn’t seem to understand that epidemic prevention is also necessary here in the Land of McNuggets. I salute her heroism! I really do. But, uh, you know. She needs to get a clue. Or, at the very least, read Daniel DeFoe’s Journal of a Plague Year.
###
In other news, I continued in a baaaaad mood yesterday, even though, the sun was out. Just. Could. Not. Get. PURCHASE. On any of my own thoughts. Couldn’t tell you why. Assume it was the fallout from feeling powerless in any real way to help RTT with his PTSD except to throw wads of cash at him long distance. And, possibly, the aftermath of a solid week of rain. My Seasonal Affective Disorder just keeps getting worse and worse as I evolve into an old crone. (Note to Self: Stock up on Vitamin D. And just buy that fucking light box all right, already.)
The Meezer managed to get herself infested with ticks, so I spent an entertaining hour or so doing emergency surgery. That was kind of fun. They were wood ticks, so unlikely to be disease-carrying. But possibly I should put her in 21-day quarantine.
Around 2pm, I gave up and started out on a Long Walk. Walked from Hyde Park across the Hudson walkway and down into the hamlet of Hyde Park, possibly 12 miles in all.
Highland is another one of those towns whose existence I can’t quite figure out. I mean, why is it there? L’s boyfriend, Chris, who’s like a walking archive of the Way Life Used to Be in the central Hudson Valley tells me that it used to be a huge truck-farming location before it became cheaper to import winter vegetables from Chile to tempt the palates of Manhattanites. Now it’s a cluster of biker bars. Yesterday, it looked like they were holding Sons of Anarchy tryouts there. Dudes! I wanted to tell them. It’s the show’s last season!
Taxied back from Poughkeepsie, too exhausted to hike the last five miles back to Hyde Park, and then, L and Chris dragged me out to a Turkey Dinner fundraiser at the Wurtemburg Lutheran Church. This was actually rather fun albeit a bit like materializing in the middle of a Garrison Keilor Lake Woebegone monologue. The gravestones in the picture all belong to Revolutionary War soldiers. I had a long, interesting chat with the Pastor about them. Also, about five miles down the road, somebody unearthed an almost perfectly preserved skeleton of a mastodon about a decade ago. He was enlarging the little pond in his back yard, and the John Deere sputtered against a really weird looking log – wait! That’s not a log!
Odd to think that as recently as 11,000 years ago, mastodons were roaming the area…
Today, I really must do some Useful Work.
She’s claiming her civil rights have been violated.
But I think the precedent here is clear: In public health emergency situations, the government has the right – in fact, I would say the obligation – to take measures to prevent the transmission of a dangerous and communicable disease.
Fuckups in the process, sure. Health officials weren’t involved in the temperature monitoring process, and so they took Hickox’s temperature with a forehead scanner. Since she was upset and flushed, her skin temperature was higher than her core temperature, which raised alarms.
Hickox’s main complaints seem to be that her various interrogators didn’t introduce themselves properly and that the female officer who took her temp with the scanner acted “smug” when she announced Hickox had a temperature of 101.
Big fucking deal.
I mean, I get it. You sacrifice a month of your life caring for the destitute and hopeless, at the very least, you’re expecting some kind of thank you. A parade would be nice, too.
But, of course, this is a choice you made. Nobody compelled your heroism, and presumably it has its own rewards, or you wouldn’t have done it.
Hickox was eventually carted off – unnecessarily – to a hospital and when subsequent tests proved she doesn’t have Ebola, she was told she’d be in quarantine for the next 21 days.
She’s pissed.
I get that, too. She’d rather be out bowling in Williamsburg.
Presumably, she’s being quarantined at the behest of the State of New Jersey, and yes, their response here was disorganized to say the least. This is what happens the first time a particular protocol is implemented. If she were the hundredth health care professional flying in from West Africa being treated like this, I’d say she had grounds to whine. But she wasn’t.
And having witnessed the devastation first-hand for herself, I’m really shocked that she doesn’t seem to understand why drastic measures are being used to contain this disease threat. Does she think being a pretty white girl is enough to protect her against Ebola? The hipster doc got it. Chances are he didn’t double glove and contaminated himself by touching his own hair while he was untying his face mask. I’ve been over this in my own mind 1,000 times -- those sterile isolation get-ups are extraordinarily hard to take off without breach. In most cases, of course, when you use these get-ups, you’re protecting the patient against your microorganisms. Breaching protocol is a lapse of professionalism, but since it’s not going to endanger you, one has to assume it happens from time to time, and no one reports it. With Ebola, on the other hand, you’re gowning up to protect yourself, and breaches are life-threatening.
Yeah. They’re making it up as they go. It doesn’t run like clockwork yet. Maybe it never will. I don’t know. But there’s some irony here that Hickox put her own life at risk to prevent an epidemic, but doesn’t seem to understand that epidemic prevention is also necessary here in the Land of McNuggets. I salute her heroism! I really do. But, uh, you know. She needs to get a clue. Or, at the very least, read Daniel DeFoe’s Journal of a Plague Year.
###
In other news, I continued in a baaaaad mood yesterday, even though, the sun was out. Just. Could. Not. Get. PURCHASE. On any of my own thoughts. Couldn’t tell you why. Assume it was the fallout from feeling powerless in any real way to help RTT with his PTSD except to throw wads of cash at him long distance. And, possibly, the aftermath of a solid week of rain. My Seasonal Affective Disorder just keeps getting worse and worse as I evolve into an old crone. (Note to Self: Stock up on Vitamin D. And just buy that fucking light box all right, already.)
The Meezer managed to get herself infested with ticks, so I spent an entertaining hour or so doing emergency surgery. That was kind of fun. They were wood ticks, so unlikely to be disease-carrying. But possibly I should put her in 21-day quarantine.
Around 2pm, I gave up and started out on a Long Walk. Walked from Hyde Park across the Hudson walkway and down into the hamlet of Hyde Park, possibly 12 miles in all.
Highland is another one of those towns whose existence I can’t quite figure out. I mean, why is it there? L’s boyfriend, Chris, who’s like a walking archive of the Way Life Used to Be in the central Hudson Valley tells me that it used to be a huge truck-farming location before it became cheaper to import winter vegetables from Chile to tempt the palates of Manhattanites. Now it’s a cluster of biker bars. Yesterday, it looked like they were holding Sons of Anarchy tryouts there. Dudes! I wanted to tell them. It’s the show’s last season!
Taxied back from Poughkeepsie, too exhausted to hike the last five miles back to Hyde Park, and then, L and Chris dragged me out to a Turkey Dinner fundraiser at the Wurtemburg Lutheran Church. This was actually rather fun albeit a bit like materializing in the middle of a Garrison Keilor Lake Woebegone monologue. The gravestones in the picture all belong to Revolutionary War soldiers. I had a long, interesting chat with the Pastor about them. Also, about five miles down the road, somebody unearthed an almost perfectly preserved skeleton of a mastodon about a decade ago. He was enlarging the little pond in his back yard, and the John Deere sputtered against a really weird looking log – wait! That’s not a log!
Odd to think that as recently as 11,000 years ago, mastodons were roaming the area…
Today, I really must do some Useful Work.
