[natch]

Not to mention riding the subway. Good luck doing contact tracing with that. I'm not saying he was contagious. I hope he wasn't.

Was the bowling alley public subway trip really a must-do thing, for someone who had just directly worked with ebola patients? Could this kind of thinking not be part of the training for this kind of work, I wonder?

[uptown]

It took the MTA over three weeks to remove a used condom hanging from the pole of an F train. I'm guessing whatever trains he took haven't been scoured beyond the bare minimum.

http://gothamist.com/2014/10/14/used_condom_f_subway.php

[maxerickson]

I think discipline is the bigger issue than awareness. Even someone who absolutely knows better can end up thinking that the bad thing can't happen to them.

[georgemcbay]

Yup.

In my experience with experts I'd say especially someone who "knows better" can end up thinking that the bad thing can't happen to them right up until they, in a fit of being human, have an oops and it does.

[bjz_]

Yeah. I hate this 'holier than thou' attitude that some folks on this thread are displaying. We are all human, and we all do stupid things based on our psychology. The best we can do is create systems to help guard against our own mistakes.

[jeffdavis]

"The best we can do is create systems to help guard against our own mistakes."

Like enforced isolation of some kind? The thing that people have been asking for since the beginning, but is a bad idea for some reason that nobody can explain?

[EliRivers]

Perhaps it's illegal to imprison people who have committed no crime, on the guess that because they were interacting with people who had a disease, they might have it too.

Also, in this case and many like it, imprisoning this man would have been much more expensive than simply testing him for the disease.

There you go; one reason it's a bad idea to imprison someone you think might be carrying ebola is that you can just test their blood and know for sure if they are. Seems a lot cheaper and better all round than imprisoning people.

[dhimes]

Quarantine is not imprisonment, and is certainly not illegal. In fact, it is customary if you, for example, sail a boat from one country to another.

The point here is that it's not clear that there's a reason to enforce a quarantine- yet. But if it becomes clear, then we need to have the balls to do it.