This is why

Before my real post of the day, something from the "This is why we can't have nice things" department:

Woman claims to have Ebola in Denison.

Yeah. Some woman went around to several doctor's offices in the area, coughed (it's not clear if she coughed ON people), claimed to have Ebola, and left.

A couple thoughts:

The chances of this woman having Ebola I estimate at just around 0. It's not absolutely impossible, but I can't imagine someone who was reasonably sure they'd contracted a deadly disease that is somewhat less deadly with good supportive medical care not actually going to a place equipped to deal with it.

If she is doing it as a prank, this is absolutely the definition of "That's not funny." You don't joke about stuff like this, just like you don't make jokes about having bombs when you're in the airport. It wasted police time to deal with this, it wasted the time of the clinic employees and disrupted what they were doing, it likely frightened some of the patients in the offices. It's just an awful thing all around.

My suspicion, though, is that she's one of those people who believes herself Special, and therefore, deserving to go to the head of the line for whatever (or asking to "speak with a manager" if she doesn't get whatever wildly unreasonable demand she makes). And so, she figured: I'll scare 'em, and then they'll give me what I want.

At any rate, if they figure out who she was? She's facing a felony charge: terroristic threats. And I am fine with that. People in this part of the world are on edge because of what happened in Dallas. My chair said she had a lot of students who had worked with her e-mailing her nervously, asking questions, stuff like that. And these are people with a biology background.  I was even a little nervous and I know some basic epidemiology. (I'm a lot less nervous now that no secondary infections have shown up from that patient. Yes, more people carrying Ebola might come to the country, probably will, but we've hopefully learned some lessons from this first case and things will go more smoothly in the future. Also, Ebola seems to be hard to catch unless you are actually caring for an infected patient.)

I'm still going to Sherman this afternoon; I have to do grocery shopping and I want to see if the new BritKnit magazines are in. I will give a very dirty look to anyone coughing in my vicinity. (And at any rate, I've had a pertussis booster last year, and I got a flu shot last week, so I should be protected from the most likely bad things I could catch)


EDited to add: Okay, this is a bit of a Reporting Fail, I think. The OTHER news site in town has additional information:

"And when she was asked to cover her mouth, she became upset and made a remark that, 'Why do you want me to do that? Because I'm black and have been to Liberia and have Ebola?'" says Eppler.

So, it wasn't someone literally making threats as a joke or to move to the head of the line, it was someone taking umbrage at something they really shouldn't take umbrage at. (Anyone coughing who doesn't cover their mouth gets asked to). So she used hyperbole, but badly, but I would not regard that as a threat. So I now say, rather than charging her with a felony, they should tell her that what she did was rude and ill-advised and they should tell the people who called this in that they over-reacted. (And that other news station needs a little bit of a dope-slap, too, for reporting it as more sensationalistic than it actually was).

But yeah. Racism is still a problem, and people of color are badly treated sometimes, but immediately going to the "nuclear option" (that you are being discriminated against) when someone asks you to do something that's regarded as common politeness....I don't know.  I think she flew off the handle. It's possible it was a moment of frustration in someone who wasn't feeling well, but it went way too far.

And yeah, I'm even more unlikely to cancel the Sherman trip now, now that it sounds less like, "Someone's going around claiming they're spreading Ebola" and  more "Someone got upset when asked to cover their mouth and said something they probably regret now."


And yeah, probably somewhere, Ray Bradbury is wagging his finger at me for trusting what a local news outlet said. But I've known people to do dumb things like claiming they were spreading a serious disease (when they actually weren't)  as a "prank"