Thursday 20 August 2015

"Sierra Leone records zero new Ebola infections"

From the BBC, the article tells you pretty much what the headline suggests.

Looks like the human race got away with it, yet again, much as I expected, most of these Ebola outbreaks seem to fizzle out after a few months.

Which reminds me of this story:

As New Orleans residents warily track another threatening storm, a new report presents the clearest picture yet of deaths from Katrina in Louisiana. Of the nearly 1,000 who died, almost half were 75 or older, according to researchers...

The results present a tragic portrait of elderly residents who may have thought the warnings were a false alarm, who feared that abandoning their homes would lead to looting, or who simply didn't want to leave their familiar surroundings for the unknown.


That's the problem: complacency. If the government subjects you to dire warnings about imminent catastrophe every few years and nothing bad happens, then sooner or later you stop taking them seriously.

9 comments:

Lola said...

Last para. I stopped taking 'the government's dire warnings' seriously when I was about 17 or 18...that's a lot of years ago now.

Mark Wadsworth said...

L, but the worrying thing is, what if one day they are telling the truth?

B,the few Europeans or Americans who caught it got just as much coverage in our media as the tens of thousands of Africans who died.

R, it's thieves vs thieves, and we can assume that the Russians bought the house in the hope of holding out for a ransom payment. LVT will sort all this out, there will be nothing to fight over.

Lola said...

MW. Precisely. But so far they have not. Or rather 'they' always exaggerate. If you take a look at Teaslers' Laws of Bureaucracy' you can mostly work it out.

Contact YPP said...

L, not much consolation to the old cynics who drowned in NO.

Contact YPP said...

L, not much consolation to the old cynics who drowned in NO.

Lola said...

CYPP Que?

Bayard said...

Mark, precisely my point, considering that none of the Europeans or Americans actually died. I suppose it is because ebola is "new". If all those people had caught malaria, it wouldn't have been news.

Woodsy42 said...

Maybe those old cynics in New Orleans simply figured that 75+ years was enough and were prepared to accept what fate delivered?

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, no Europeans died apart from those who did
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-29514920

W42, unlikely.