“Some members of Congress have urged President Barack Obama to ban all travel from West Africa. Tuesday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., praised the expansion of airport screening but again urged Obama to halt all travel from the region.”
The entire concept of caching Ebola is quite terrifying, especially when you take into account what it actually does to you, and that there is a good chance you could die from it. And I am sure the general public has been saturated enough from the media to truly be paranoid about the idea of catching Ebola. Everybody seems to think they are at risk of catching it. From people cancelling gym memberships, to people not flying places, everybody thinks Ebola is right around the corner from them, and they think they will catch it. Maybe what is fueling this are bogus statistics.
I, on the other hand, think that people are not as likely to catch Ebola as they might think. What is not taken into account is the “Human Factors” portion of this.
What needs to be understood here is that some people are less susceptible to catching Ebola than others. This can be because of genetics, or it can be because of their lifestyle. But nonetheless, not everybody has the same chance of catching Ebola. This should be understood and taken into account when people think about the topic.
Thus, I think that screening against everybody who comes through the airport is highly inefficient, and delays multiple people at a time. While we are not fully technologically there yet to simply be able to do something like a retina scan and then have people go about their day if they are not infected, I hope high authority can learn to understand statistics more as it merges with technology in the near future.
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