Fears about the Ebola virus spreading to this country are greater now that New York doctor Craig Spencer has been diagnosed with the virus. New York is home to one of the largest T&T communities in the diaspora and an extremely popular destination for travellers from this country. The question of cancelling or postponing Carnival 2015 is on the minds of many and T&T Guardian columnist Mark Wilson explores the facts about the virus.
"Too soon to say" is the usual answer. But let's check the pointers. So. It's in New York.
As we know, that's one short stop from here on the Global Express. On Thursday, a brave doctor tested positive, after working on the front line in Guinea up to October 12. He was taken to Bellevue Hospital by trained paramedics in hazmat suits. Should we panic? No.
Before he showed symptoms, Dr Craig Spencer had travelled the subway, taken a taxi, gone jogging and visited a bowling alley. Because he was not yet symptomatic, he would at that stage have been massively unlikely to spread the infection. His fianc�e and two friends were in closer contact, and are at risk, they have been quarantined.
By contrast, the Dallas patient who died, Thomas Duncan, was initially sent home after showing symptoms. He sat in open waiting rooms.
Healthcare personnel hurriedly fixed gaps in their hazmats. In spite of these errors, Ebola was contained. Two nurses were infected, but after treatement they are now virus-free.
New York is better prepared than Dallas was.
What's up in West Africa?
More precisely: in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia? That is not good news. Ebola is spreading fast. There's talk of the case load rising to 10,000 a week, even higher. Health resources are massively over-stretched.
Is that in itself a reasonto cancel Carnival?
Probably not. If the outbreak remains largely confined to those three nations, other countries should not sit quaking in their shoes for their own safety. They should concentrate on sending help. And there's a massive need for outside help–from Europe, North America, Cuba, China–anyone who can contribute.
The other thing for the outside world to concentrate on, would be getting basic protective measures in place.
That means educating the population, not stirring up panic. It means planning and training.
And it means making sure facilities are in place–hazmat suits, isolation units and so on. These aren't just needed for Ebola; they should also be part of a strategy to protect against any serious infection.
Is Ebola spreading to other countries?
Ebola is not raging out of control worldwide.
The Nigeria outbreak is officially over, with 20 infected and eight deaths–one death per 20 million, in Nigeria's huge population. The outbreak in Senegal never got beyond a single case.
The unrelated outbreak of a different Ebola strain in a remote part of the Democratic Republic of Congo is under control.
The nurse who was infected in Spain is cured.
That's not to say it will stop here. There may be another mini-outbreak in Nigeria. They may be other sporadic cases in Europe or North America. Each time round, the health authorities will be better prepared, and better able to cope.
Is T&T under immediate threat?
No. At the best of times, there is very little travel to this country from Liberia, Guinea or Sierra Leone. Now, with a travel ban in place, there's less. There's a tiny chance that someone who has been infected in Africa, North America or Europe may travel here. It's not a "can't happen," but it's a "probably won't."
What if there's a major outbreak in New York, London, somewhere like that?
Major outbreak? So not just a handful of quarantined cases? That's very unlikely. But if it did happen, it would change things. A raging Ebola outbreak in Europe or North America, with thousands of cases and a string of deaths would carry a big risk. Those countries are on our frequent-flier list.
In that case we would have plenty to worry about, besides Carnival. Routine travel would be a consideration. So would Christmas visits. Indeed, worldwide tourism would nosedive. Financial markets would plunge.
Beyond even that, there's the science fiction scenario, where world trade grinds to a halt, and we stampede to Massy Stores for their remaining canned food.
That is massively unlikely. Though of course we can jog the "collapse of trade" bit along somewhat, if the OWTU continues to play stupid with oil cargoes.
Nobody else is cancelling anything
The Hajj has just finished. With more than three million pilgrims, it dwarfs T&T's Carnival.
Guinea is 85 per cent Muslim, Sierra Leone 71 per cent, and Liberia 12 per cent. People from Ebola-affected countries are far more likely to travel to Mecca than to Port-of-Spain.
If the Hajj did lead to a rash of Ebola oubreaks across the Muslim world, that news is yet to break in world media. Brazil hasn't cancelled its Carnival.
England hasn't called off the Premier League season. Manchester's Old Trafford stadium hosts crowds of 75,000 or more. Australian and New Zealand are pressing ahead with next year's Cricket World Cup. In Sydney, last Wednesday's headline in the Daily Telegraph read: "West Indies banned? Aussie selection headaches, Scotland wins." Nothing about Ebola there.
London Underground and the New York subway have not pulled their morning rush-hour services.
But won't it take just one passenger to infect a whole aircraft?
Not really. Passengers who are not showing symptoms do not spread the virus. So a single asymptomatic passenger remains just tha–one passenger.
Ebola does not feel like just a bad case of flu. A passenger who is showing symptoms would probably not be feeling well enough to travel to the airport and board.
If one did–or if symptoms developed during a long flight–then those in direct contact with the passenger or body fluids would be at risk.
With no mass Ebola outbreak in America or Europe, that's a somewhat unlikely scenario. But if it unfolded, a good dose of bleach could be used in-flight to decontaminate infected surfaces. And a few surgical gloves on board would be of some help, too.
Just breathing the air on the plane would not pose a danger. "Ebola is not an airborne infection," says Christine Carrington, UWI Professor of Molecular Genetics and Virology.
Or one reveller to infect the whole Carnival?
Same applies. Anyone at the infectious stage probably won't feel like partying.
...and Christmas?
That's the point. People travel for many reasons, and at all times of year. Says David Lopez, President of the National Carnival Bands' Association: "Why make Carnival a whipping horse?"
And there's a demand side too
If we get people panicked enough, they won't want to play. That would mean a limping Carnival, not a cancelled one.
Meanwhile, there's hope
Vaccine trials in Africa are now planned for December. That's December this year, with a few hundred thousand doses ready by mid-2015. It is "not the magic bullet," says Dr Marie Paule Kieny of the WHO, but "a good part of the effort to turn the tide."
Ebola, race and fear
The examples of Ebola hysteria in the US are growing too numerous to count.
Two students from Rwanda, 2,600 miles from West Africa, are sent home from a New Jersey elementary school for 21 days. A Maine high school teacher is given three weeks off because she attended a convention in Dallas, Texas.
A Texas college sends out letters to prospective students from disease-free Nigeria that informing them that they are no longer accepting applications from countries with "confirmed Ebola cases". A Pennsylvania high school football player is met by chants of "Ebola" from the opposing team. A middle school principal goes to a funeral in Zambia, also with no cases of Ebola, and is put on paid administrative leave for a week.
Some writers think they've found a theme that energises these fears, tying many of these incidents together: racism.
"In both the United States and Europe, Ebola is increasing racial profiling and reviving imagery of the 'Dark Continent'," writes Robin Wright, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, for CNN. "The disease is persistently portrayed as West African, or African, or from countries in a part of the world that is racially black, even though nothing medically differentiates the vulnerability of any race to Ebola."
And as the disease is associated with blacks, she says, it contributes to and feeds off already existing racism in Western society.
The Verge's Arielle Duhaime-Ross takes note of reports that residents of the immigrant-populated Dallas neighbourhood where Thomas Eric Duncan first displayed Ebola symptoms are experiencing "immense discrimination."
"The colour of their skin and their accents make them a target, even though they never came into contact with Duncan, and therefore pose zero risk," she writes. "It doesn't matter: they're dark-skinned and foreign. They're in Dallas. They might be infectious."
According to the National Review's Charles CW Cooke, however, the accusations of racism are like the fable of the little boy who cried wolf. He says these writers are "shepherds of the asinine, undermining the very cause to which they hope to draw attention.
"We can either regard the word Ebola as an opportunity for the promulgation of chichi sociology essays, or–preferably, I think –we can recognise that we are talking here about a serious problem that requires a serious remedy," he says.
Danusha Goska, writing in the American Thinker, asserts that race is a factor in the reaction to the Ebola outbreak, but not in the way liberals present it.
Instead, she writes, "white guilt" is the real complicating factor. It's preventing Western nations from taking the necessary steps to combat the disease, such as changing tribal customs that tolerate the consumption of possibly dangerous bush meat and encourage unsafe burial ceremonies that involve the handling of possibly contagious corpses.
"White guilt shines the spotlight on white liberal heroism and reduces blacks to supporting players in the white man's drama," he writes. "Blacks exist only to be pathetic, to be helpless and to supply the white ego with a black object to save. Any problems that significantly involve black people are not to be talked about with the same clarity we devote to other problems."
For David Brooks of the New York Times, race isn't the problem, class is. Americans live in an increasingly segmented society, alienated from their political, cultural and scientific leaders.
"The Ebola crisis has aroused its own flavour of fear," he writes. "It's not the heart-pounding fear you might feel if you were running away from a bear or some distinct threat. It's a sour, existential fear. It's a fear you feel when the whole environment seems hostile, when the things that are supposed to keep you safe, like national borders and national authorities, seem porous and ineffective, when some menace is hard to understand."
Given the science of Ebola, the prospect of three cases turning into 300 or 3,000 in the US are miniscule. But the threat Ebola has exposed–what Brooks calls the "weakness in the fabric of our culture"–has been laid bare.
The next crisis, the next contagion of fear, may not be so easy to contain. (BBC)