All of these responses along the lines of 'cows and cars and common flu have killed more people than Ebola therefore Ebola is less dangerous than cows, cars or flu' are the laziest form of false equivalence.

If as many people were exposed to Ebola as are people exposed to ordinary flu, or cows for that matter, it would mean the end of humanity. Shall we wait until the numbers are big enough to impress the stupid before we call for all hands on deck?

If Ebola makes a simple mutation to airborne transmission, something that's entirely possible according to Ebola experts, it will mean the end of civilization.

We need an unprecedented global response to contain the epidemic, regardless of how likely it is to become more virulent, we simply can't afford the risk.

I didn't say that racism was involved but I thought my point would get across: OP sounds like he's worried that leaving is/would be/could be considered to be racist. He mentioned that it was a 'awkward situation' which is what lead me to speculate on the matter.

That is not known. Ebola is transmitted via fluid, but it takes very little fluid. The nurse in Spain suspects that she only touched her face with her gloved hand, and that's how she caught it. There might be enough virus in cough or sneeze droplets to transmit it. It's just not known at this time.

And the one that lived was treated with a drug that is not available.

Another brick in the wall of fear.

The lesson here is to never play cards with a cow.

Grrr, beat me to it....but I was going to say "....play roulette with a cow..."

If the discussion were about how the government and other entities should be responding to these threats, you would be entirely correct, but we're talking about what it makes sense for random every day people to actually be afraid of to the point of actually affecting how they interact with people, so your point is entirely irrelevant.

Actually, there's two discussions with a lot of overlap taking place in the same thread, as is often the case on 2+2, so your hall monitoring is at least as irrelevant.

You're right, there are 2 discussions going on, and 1 of them doesn't belong in this forum. Let's stay on topic and discuss the points that are relevant to poker/casinos. Want to talk global/government? Go to OOT or Politics.

Okay. He maintains that Ebola is less dangerous than proximity to cows, therefore we shouldn't be afraid of contracting Ebola from poker players recently arrived from west Africa. I maintain that's ridiculous, for the above stated reasons.

Hypothetically, if you were to be forced to tell people you had HIV, i'd gather most would people would not sit next to you.

Maybe in a high limit, small player pool situation they won't but the 1/2 crowd is leaving.

You call it false equivalence, I call it common sense perspective. There are a million more pressing things to be afraid of than the Ebola virus and simple logic bears it out. If it were so contagious that you should avoid people from Africa then that same contagious virus would have already spread Zombie style around the Earth in less than 72 hours...

Thus, being afraid of it is just silly.


What dafuq are you talking about??? Talk about mixing apples and oranges together into a ****** salad. I feel my IQ dropping as I try to contemplate what the hell your point is with this above rant....

As near as I can figure, you are afraid of Ebola. Okay, I can get behind that. I'm afraid of Ebola too, and HIV, and cobras, and I don't like sharks either...

If as many people were exposed to cobras as they are to the flu then we'd all be dead. So therefore we should panic and be scared of cobras???

The point as near as I can figure it is that Ebola is not a problem in the US, so it makes no sense to worry about it until it becomes a problem...

Wow, you must watch Fox News huh?

If my aunt had a 8-inch slong then she would be my uncle...

A "simple" mutation to become airborne is not simple. Given the gazillion Ebola Viruses running around inside various people it stands to reason if it were to ever mutate to an airborne virus it would have already done so.

Again, it just really isn't worth expending any amount of serious energy worrying about this kind of stuff. If you follow the news cycle there is always some disease out there that is going to kill us all.

Bird Flu, Mad Cow, West Nile Virus, some super flu bug, the list goes on and on and on...

I despise Faux News. My source are actual Ebola experts, quoted in the Los Angeles Times. Feel free not to worry, but don't twist what I said.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...39&postcount=6

False.

The problem I have whenever "they" try to put science into a normal newspaper is they dumb it down. They use words like "could" and "might" and "possibly" but those words are meaningless. They need to do a much better job quantifying those probabilities.

But they don't because it sells more newspapers when you say "possibly..."

Fair enough, I should have said the probability is low, approaching zero.

****

Overall, my view on this is just from a mathematical perspective.

Given the sheer number of people that travel, work, or live in confined spaces...

Given the amount of global travel and interaction people have...

Given the amount of contact human beings have with one another...

If there were ever a really contagious dangerous disease out there that was easily transmitted person to person then we are screwed. I mean, all it would take is just "one" person with this infection to go to any airport in the entire world. And then Boom, just like that, the human race is screwed.

IMO there are two big reasons why we are safe
--The reality is that the human immune system is actually pretty kick ass.
--Thankfully it is hard for viruses to spread across different mediums i.e. blood => air => blood.

Those above two combinations more or less protect our species.

Not to say it's not more complex than that, I'm sure it is...

But if we approach it from a mathematical perspective, then there really is just no cause to worry. Because if there were, we'd all be infected Zombie style. So I just can't get behind the paranoia about worrying about someone sitting next to me in a Casino who is from Africa for fear that I will catch Ebola from them...

"Some experts".

If there were anything resembling a consensus — if they didn't have to go cherry-picking for those experts — they would have just written "experts". But they can't get away with writing that.

It's not that the premise is necessarily wrong, it's that if you were to ignore every article that uses the phrase "some experts" in its title or body you would be more informed than if you hadn't.

There's very few things in the world that there's 100% consensus on, but these are actual experts on an arcane subject. To discount their opinion on such a dire subject because we don't have 100% agreement seems downright bizarre to me, but I'm aware that I have a high tolerance for ambiguity. The public has almost none.

Unsupported.

Ebola has a high mutation rate, to be sure, but mutations are random, and so its entirely possible that a mutation to an airborne state requires exactly the right combination of changes to occur in the right order making it statistically improbable, but from what I understand, Ebola mutates just about every time it reproduces, so like buying a few hundred thousand unique lottery tickets, each ticket itself is unlikely to win, but collectively the odds increase.

On the other hand - for all we know an airborne viable form of the virus has occurred before, but somewhere in the remote jungle where it didn't get passed to any other creatures upon whom the virus could survive, so it died out...

I think the only safe statement wrt airbone ebola is, "We don't know how likely it is..."

This discussion has morphed far away from poker/casinos. There's a thread in OOT for general ebola discussion: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/34...ected-1462773/