In a country rapidly moving into all-out panic mode over Ebola, Uber — a company that links up limousine drivers with people in need of rides — deserves some sort of prize. When it emerged last week that a doctor who had recently returned to New York after a stint in West Africa, treating Ebola patients, was exhibiting signs of the disease himself, America’s national media went into full-on crisis mode. After all, an Ebola patient or two in Dallas or at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta was one thing and an Ebola patient in New York — where most of America’s national mediapersons live and work — was something else entirely.
A large media scrum instantly formed in front of the hospital where the doctor was being treated and a somewhat smaller one appeared outside his apartment. Within a day, the governors of New York (a Democrat) and New Jersey (a Republican) announced quarantine measures for some travellers arriving from West Africa. The fact that most medical professionals described these as unnecessary did not seem to matter (New York’s governor later eased these slightly, reportedly under pressure from the White House; New Jersey’s governor did not). Recriminations began flying around the city as doctors, media and public health professionals sought simultaneously to reconstruct the stricken physician’s movements in the days before his Ebola symptoms surfaced and to reassure the public that those movements were not really anything to worry about (New York’s mayor made a point of having himself photographed eating at a restaurant the doctor had recently visited).
Among the things the doctor had done before becoming symptomatic: Book a car ride through Uber. At a moment when fear and misinformation seem to be driving most discussions of Ebola in the US in general and New York in particular, the car service responded to this revelation with a public statement that was a model of sanity: “We reviewed our records and were able to confirm that one of our driver partners in New York provided a ride to the patient. We immediately contacted the CDC and NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), which stated that neither our driver partner nor any of his subsequent passengers are at risk. We have communicated this to the driver and the NYC DOHMH medical team met with the driver in person, assuring him that he was not at risk. Our thoughts are with the patient and his loved ones.”
Compare this with the news a few days earlier that a school district in the northeastern state of Maine had placed a teacher on leave for three weeks (the incubation period of the Ebola virus) simply because she had visited Dallas — a huge city where, at the time, a single patient with Ebola was quarantined at a single hospital that, by most reports, the teacher never came within 15 kilometres of. Around the same time, parents in the southern state of Mississippi pulled children out of school after learning that the school’s principal had recently travelled to Zambia — which, as Gulf News readers surely know, is a very long way from Liberia or Guinea.
Obviously some of this is driven by fear and ignorance and that is understandable. What is being witnessed in the US, however, goes beyond a sometimes irrational fear of the unknown. With an election now barely one week away, politicians are routinely being asked about Ebola. Almost universally they are criticising the government’s response. Often, rivals attempt to outdo each other in calling for stricter measures. In doing so, both sides (eagerly helped by the media) feed the distrust of government that has existed in America since the country’s founding, but has become something close to political dogma over the last 35 years.
One sometimes gets the sense that a lot of people do not want to hear that the public health system is doing a reasonably good job of containing and treating Ebola because that would clash with their deeply held belief that the government can never do anything right. For people like these, the fact that the government is telling them not to panic can seem like proof that panic is warranted.
So here is a tip off my hat to the people who run Uber for having the good sense to trust trained public health professionals and the courage not to cave in to panic (which, commercially speaking, would surely have been the easier thing to do). This terrible plague will only be stopped if everyone in the world pulls together to protect our own societies while offering Africa the help it so desperately needs. That can never happen while fearmongers define the conversation.
Gordon Robison, a longtime Middle East journalist and US political analyst, teaches political science at the University of Vermont.
