Contradictions, Mistakes and Bullshit Are What Worry Us in Ebola Response

On the other hand, most of us probably prefer to save our panic for the real thing. I haven't been able to get enough detail from anybody yet to explain why people have been telling officials they have Ebola and have had contact with Duncan when neither is true. Maybe the people doing this are hypochondriacs. Maybe they are crazy. Maybe somebody thought he was about to get caught for embezzlement. No telling.

But if it happens with Ebola, it probably happens in every major public health scare. We must assume the CDC knows from experience it will happen and wants to avoid O.J. Simpson helicopter pursuits every time some college student uses Ebola to get out of a final.

There is great misgiving concerning the official line on transmission of Ebola. Only when news of the infected nurse broke did the CDC back off its aggressive initial portrayal of Ebola as transmissible only through physical contact with an infectious person.

If we simply watch the behavior of public health officials — the elaborate decontamination of the Duncan apartment in Dallas, for example, more than a week after Patient Zero had been removed from it, followed by decontamination of the nurse's apartment building — then the simplest common sense tells us that health officials are worried about something in those apartments that is physically separate and discrete from the bodies of infectious persons.

Confidence is not instilled in us by health officials who spend all their time telling us not to worry, telling us they are not worried, painting a picture of transmission that is in dramatic contradiction to the evidence in front of our eyes.

And then there is the problem of the unexpected, the rogue problem that we simply hadn't thought about before. Everybody probably knew ahead of time that premises occupied by an infectious Ebola victim would have to be decontaminated. But nobody had thought about who was going to do it or how.

When the unexpected happens — and the unexpected always happens — official pronouncements of absolute mastery and control make the officials look either duplicitous or silly. Every misstep, every bungle in this case fed the impression that officials in Washington, Atlanta and Dallas were out of touch with reality in the field.

None of these decisions about what to say and what not to say have come easily here. People who have been behind the scenes tell me local officials in Dallas have had serious disagreements about the gathering of information and the public release of basic facts in the Ebola story. Some early information — especially the identities of exposed persons — wasn't gathered quickly enough. In some cases local officials who did gather the information didn't want to share it immediately with other agencies.

Some of the contention has involved decisions about what and how much to tell the public. Those who have counseled not releasing basic information seem not to understand that in America, basic information just gets out anyway. It can come out smooth or it can come out ugly, but it's coming out.

The commenter who goes by the pseudonym "Everlastingphelps" said on our news blog last week: "Here's an idea — treat Americans like adults. Tell us the bad news. We can handle it and decide how to deal with it individually."

Not a bad beginning.