The cure for Ebola panic in the US is more panic

Listen. A lot of people have been complaining about our Ebola panic. Turn on cable news, and you find people frantically asking if you can get it from a bowling ball (nope) and whether the virus is notably, magically different now that it has touched American soil (also no).

Just start typing “can I get Ebola from” into Google and it suggests all kinds of frenzied questions. “A toilet seat?” “Sneezing?” (Soon: “A czar?” “Dreams?” “Impure thoughts?”) We have enough panic to fill the 24-hour cable news channels 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with the occasional break for commercials (to panic about the loss of our sexual potency or panic about what will happen to Grandma if she falls in the house when she is alone). We show no signs of slowing down. Each bit of news leads to a new, unforeseen angle of panic. A dog is in quarantine! What if the country is overrun with Ebola-ridden dogs? An Ebola patient touched a bowling ball! Is it safe to bowl again, ever?

Now people are saying we need to calm down. That this panic is doing more harm than good. That, in the scheme of things, we (in America, anyway) are far less likely to contract Ebola than to be killed by lightning, bees or sharks. People say this as though it is reassuring.

Frankly, it is the opposite. If you want me to calm down, do not tell me about other things that are more likely to kill me. That is not how this works.

“Relax,” NPR says. “Your chance of contracting Ebola this year in America is just 1 in 13.3 million.” You are not only more likely to be killed by a shark than by Ebola — the odds of shark death were, according to United Kingdom scientists in 2008, 300,000,000 to 1 — you are more likely to be killed by a falling coconut (250,000,000 to 1), though I could be misreading these statistics. (I am very nervous and excitable these days and it is hard to comprehend data in this state.)

I guess what they want is for us to look at these statistics and conclude that we are panicking too much about Ebola.

I say: Where is the coconut panic?

It’s only reasonable. If the odds of contracting Ebola in the US are as comparatively slim as people say, this does not mean that we are too panicked about Ebola.

This means we are not panicking enough about everything else. Look at all the other things that could take us out when we least expect it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has tables and tables of such data, just waiting for us to seize them in our clammy hands. Operations of war and their sequelae. Events of Undetermined Intent. (The titles alone are terrifying!) Snake bites. Food poisoning. Falling out of bed. Using a right-handed product as a left-handed person (this claims multiple lives every year!) Bees.

Why aren’t Americans panicking about bees? If this is true, and CNN isn’t constantly plastered with coverage of new hives discovered in neighbour’s back yard, it’s clear that there are sinister forces at work and the government is in the pocket of Big Bee. If the president, the head of the CDC, and the mayor of New York City have to go on record saying that the Ebola situation is under control, why isn’t the president constantly addressing Americans about sharks? They are a much greater threat!

Finding a cure for beds

Where is the Bed Czar? Do you know how many people die by falling out of bed each year? I sleep in a bed every night. Should I be allowed to do that? Can’t we find a cure for beds, like maybe some sort of mat or low-slung cushion? And don’t get me started on drowning in the bath. Why are we still allowing dozens, if not hundreds, of Americans to bathe every year?

Americans need to panic about slippery floors and insecure railings and unlocked guns around the home. We need to panic about bears. We need to panic about above-ground pools. We need to panic about the Grand Canyon and peanuts and doing anything on a roof, ever. We need to panic about leaving the house. We need to panic about staying inside the house. We need to panic about sequelae and events of undetermined intent. We should also panic about hypertension, although I’m not sure how that will work, exactly. If Americans really want to get into it, they could argue that their true panic leader is Michelle Obama, who’s been urging us to eat healthier and work out more for years (heart disease, after all, is millions of times more likely to get you than any of the above). But people complain that her campaign has been taking steam away from Ebola.

Regardless, noisy, irrational, blind panic is an American tradition of long standing. We’ve been doing it for hundreds of years, including but not limited to October 29, 1929, and some memorable weeks in Salem in 1692. The solution is not to stop now. The solution is to be more panicky about everything else. Especially sharks. Live every week like it’s Shark Week, as someone wise once said.

To mangle a Proust quote, if a little panic is dangerous, the cure for it is not to panic less but to panic more, to panic all the time. Just not about Ebola.

–Washington Post