or Maybe We Should Be Happy We Got Our First Case

I was one of the people who took President Bush serious when he said that any community that at the time of a Bird Flu or a pandemic that expects the Federal Calvary to come and rescue them, that, that community would be set for pure tragedy. That scared the daylight out of me. What he meant is that no country can be prepared for a pandemic and that the only way to really be prepared is to have your own personal plan. Let me explain it like this, during the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918 we lost anywhere from 40 to 100 million people who died from the flu. How could we as a country service that many people who were sick? We can’t, and that’s why we would be set for pure tragedy… A personal plan has to be done. That meant to me, it is time to make our family disaster supplies to be stocked with things needed for a bad flu.

At the time of the Presidents Bird Flu report I went on to notify most cities in the state of Florida that according to the presidents report that our local commodities were way behind in our pandemic policy. I sent emails to almost every city commission in the state and sad to say some of them had no idea what I was talking about and many just ignored my words of wisdom. A few months later I got a call from the Broward County Board of Commissioners and I was asked if I wanted to be part of the counties pandemic planning task force. I of course said yes. The city of Hollywood also invited me to their critical response and pandemic planning conference. I ended up being the only non-government person at the conference. I say this all to you so you know where I am coming from when I write below about the current case of Ebola in the USA. There are many questions and concerns and there are many who are saying that the president is making mistakes.

Americans are asking why are we letting people come over to the USA from these other areas of the world that have current cases of Ebola? According to the CDC, they stated if we close our borders down from areas that have current cases of Ebola it would make the situation over there worse. I disagree. At this time I do not think there needs to be a shutdown of our borders because for one it is very hard to catch this disease and it is even harder to catch it in developed countries. However, it can mutate where it can be very easy to catch so we do need to be watching it very closely. We can also do voluntary self-social distancing where the person coming back from these parts of the world must agree to stay inside and away from others for a period of 21 days. We should not stop travel to those parts of the world that is essential in stopping this disease.

Of course we now have citizens asking why are we sending people to that region helping these sick people and why are we giving aid to that region? Let’s for one second think of the moral obligation to help those in need when we can. If not for moral reasons let’s look at the science of it all. We must let our Disease Detectives do their job for many reasons. They must learn how to fight the disease as well as stop the spread of it for our own national security. We cannot let it get out of control because when that happens millions of Americans may be at risk.

I am very glad we got exposed to the first case of Ebola. Wait a minute, “Sean are you saying that you’re happy we have Ebola here in America.” YES I AM. I was also happy we had the “Swine Flu.” OK… There is a reason for my madness. On a personal note I believe the best way to help society at the time of a crisis is for us to look back at history. We call this “lessons learned.” What did we learn at the time of the last bad flu? What did we learn from getting our first case of Ebola? When we learn from our past mistakes we can treat the future much better. So by us getting our first case of Ebola it exercised our emergency response, it put us in the mode of emergency operations, it showed us our weaknesses, and it allowed us to think about travel restrictions. We are BLESSED we got our case and we are going to put our plan into action and learn, learn, learn.