Bob CollinsWithin a week or so, the Ebola “crisis” may be over before it ever started here.
It’s been almost two weeks since Thomas Duncan died and the only two people to have contracted the disease in the United States were two nurses who treated him and both are reportedly on the way to recovery. Over the weekend, a nurse in Spain, who also cared for an Ebola victim, was tested and declared Ebola free. Another aid worker, the one who went through it without publicity, was quietly released — Ebola free — from Emory University Hospital over the weekend.
If you’re keeping score, that’s two people out of 319 million residents of the United States.
The face of Ebola today might as well be Peter Pattakos, a Cleveland attorney who didn’t get it.
He spent 20 minutes in a bridal shop getting fitted with a tux the other day, the same bridal shop visited by Amber Joy Vinson, the nurse who took a flight to Cleveland from Dallas when she apparently showed Ebola symptoms.
“I thought, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,'” Pattakos tells the Cleveland Plain Dealer. And there any fear stopped.
“I didn’t exchange any bodily fluids with anyone, so I’m not worried about it,” he said. “I’m much more likely to be mistakenly killed by a police officer in this country than to be killed by Ebola, even if you were in the same bridal shop.”
“I wish people would freak out this much about climate change,” he said. “It’s one of those problems that’s real easy for the media to cover, rather than some of those other problems that people should be more concerned with.”
Did someone say climate change?
2014 is on track to be the warmest year recorded on earth, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. September’s average global temperature was 1.3 degrees above the 20th century average.
