You’re have to be more specific what paper you’re talking about; the thread is 16 pages now.
For the zillionth and first time, the issue is not merely contagiousness. And I still don’t see anything offered by you, the great cite-demander.
Correct.
The actions the CDC requested were reasonable in light of the potential public health risk.There’s really no way to make the CDC’s request unreasonable simply by pulling out the most ridiculous actions you can think of and trying to make them an analogy: What if they told him to hammer nails into his head?? What if they told him to rape a monkey??? Why? Because two thinks have to be at least minimally analogous for an analogy to exist, much less work. So I guess my reply is what I generally say when presented with a stupid so-called analogy: If my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle.
You don’t dispute they told him not to fly, do you? Because that’s the issue for me. AFAICT, he never would have been quarantined if he hadn’t demonstrated his inability or unwillingness to voluntarily comply with the CDC’s requests. Health authorities don’t quarantine as a first option; they quarantine as a last resort. Or they did until now – next time we can assume they will quarantine much earlier, or at least impose significant travel restrictions.
No. It’s not disobeying them that makes him an asshole; it’s completely doing the opposite and potentially endangering the public health thereby. As I said before, there are two reasonable options when the CDC says You may present a public health hazard. Don’t get on a plane. You can put yourself in their hands and trust them, or you can independently determine whether their conclusion is medically and epidemiologically valid, by consulting your own doctors and running your own tests, while refraining from endangering the public health until you know if the CDC is wrong or not. This of course takes time and money, but if you have both, go crazy. But because you cannot ASSUME they are wrong, the one thing you do NOT do is race off and do exactly what they told you not to do, and to hell with the unknown public health implications.
Thoughtless asshole. If you are quoting me, please do so correctly. And, yeah, those are pretty much the two options: Reasonable (not an asshole) or unreasonable (an asshole). Now, you can argue about where he rates on the asshole scale (is he a 2 or a 10?) but IMO there isn’t much doubt based on his actions that he’s on there someplace. He was told by the CDC not to fly. He knew he was on the no-fly list. He knew he had XDR-TB. So what did he do? He flew to the Czech Republic and then flew to Canada. Why? Because he was worried that he’d get stuck in that third-world cesspit, Italy. And that was a dilemma he wouldn’t have been in in the first place if he hadn’t hurried off to Europe (two days before scheduled to leave) without knowing the exact nature of his illness – an illness he knew before he left was probably serious enough to warrant extended treatment at a specialized hospital.
He was selfish. He was irresponsible. He made a series of bad choices that caught up with him in Italy, and he wasn’t willing to live with the consequences of them, so he made a couple more. He evaded the authorities and exposed people to a very dangerous disease in order to achieve his own selfish agenda. He did a grave disservice to every person with a dangerous communicable disease who in the future won’t be trusted as he was, as a direct result of his irresponsibility. He was a first-class, gold-plated asshole.