Hooray for Mark Dayton's Ebola Quarantine plan

Conservatives are running around with their hair on fire, displaying what one of our blog friends, Democommie, commonly refers to as the flaming stupid, as part of their core ideology.

In stark contrast, our good Governor Mark Dayton announced the Minnesota policy towards Ebola, one that takes into consideration our Liberian citizen population, would be 'based on science'.  From the STrib:

Restrictions would vary for other travelers returning from Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone — the three nations at the center of the Ebola outbreak — depending on their perceived risk levels, state officials explained. Those who simply traveled to those countries to visit relatives would be asked to submit to daily health monitoring when they return to the state. Health care providers who cared for Ebola patients but had no known exposure to the virus would not need home confinement. Health care providers with potential exposures, such as being stuck with a needle while caring for an Ebola patient, would be confined at home.

All travelers returning from the west African nations would be subject to travel restrictions. Those potentially exposed to Ebola during their travels would be banned from public transportation, while all travelers under monitoring would be asked to refrain from trips using public transportation lasting longer than three hours.

All returnees would need to be isolated in hospital care if they showed Ebola symptoms. The monitoring and restrictions generally would last 21 days, the maximum period required for an Ebola infection to produce symptoms.

While Ebola has proved a lethal virus, killing half of the people in Africa it has infected, it only spreads through contact with infected bodily fluids such as blood or saliva — and people carrying the virus aren’t contagious until they suffer fevers or symptoms. That gives health officials an early warning to remove infected patients from contact with others before the virus has a chance to spread.

But what to do while waiting for symptoms to emerge, or not, has been a topic of intense debate. Minnesota for the past week has been following federal guidelines to monitor travelers from west Africa by calling them daily to report on their physical health and body temperature.

Dayton gathered a variety of legal, medical and ethics experts over the weekend to develop a policy for Minnesota that was protective but appropriate.

“The resulting policy protects Minnesotans by ensuring that anyone coming from Ebola-affected areas is monitored according to their risk and treated according to their need,” said Dr. Steven Miles, a U bioethics expert.

Returnees in recent weeks have mostly been doctors such as Spencer and other aide workers seeking to stop the spread of Ebola in west Africa, where so far the virus has infected at least 10,000 people and caused 4,900 deaths. But Minnesota has the added concern of a robust population of 30,000 residents from Liberia who might travel back to the country or host relatives from there.

Since daily monitoring began last week, state officials said there have been 26 travelers to Minnesota from the three west African nations.

The home-confinement policy for health care providers exposed to Ebola patients is the latest in a series of changes in Minnesota’s Ebola preparedness strategy — changes influenced by the first U.S.-diagnosed case in Texas earlier this month and the infection of two nurses who cared for the man. Hospital officials in Minnesota have now designated four hospitals that will provide long-term care of Ebola patients once they are diagnosed.

Conservatives hate science, reject science, deny science, and then usually pat themselves on the back in congratulation of how smart they are to have out-thought those who have studied the science and know more than they do.

It is a combination on the part of conservatives of some of the worst of the conspiracy theory nutjobbery, and their politics of the worst of simplistic thinking and wilful ignorance.

The insanity ranges from conservative fool, ag professor Cyril Broderick, who frequents the worst of the right wing fringe propaganda sources, claiming that Ebola was created by the U.S. Defense Department as some sort of demented anti-African plot, to the Idiot Issa in Congress who can't pronounce the disease and who doesn't know the difference between Guinea in Africa and Guiana.  Issa is not an honest man - in fact he is a criminal, and he is not an honest critic of the President's administration, but rather a dishonest hack pushing manipulative and exploitive tea party propaganda on the pathetically stupid.

The contrast between good government from Democrats and bad government from Republicans, and how each plays to their respective base, couldn't be more stark.