Morality in a time of Ebola

The first true epidemic of Ebola led to widespread panic. The virus appeared in so many countries in 2014—including Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Spain, and the USA—that WHO, officials at the US National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and many other government officials around the world declared the epidemic to be out of control. Talk of desperation and apocalypse with reference to Ebola is not uncommon. Previous Ebola outbreaks were rapidly contained through a combination of local attentiveness, the availability of resources, focused public education, and a bit of luck. In the 2014 outbreak, resources were slow to arrive, poverty and ignorance held sway, and luck failed to appear. The epidemic jumped from village to village, nation to nation, and from afflicted patients to caregivers and family members at an alarming rate. Ebola reached one nation, Senegal, with major global air connections, another, Nigeria, with a huge population, and a third, the USA, where errors were made in the care of an infected visitor leading to the infection of two nurses, which raised the level of anxiety even higher than it had been.