Ebolarama

I’m hoping that if I lie very quiet and still under my bed, the Ebola virus will pass over me like a merciful angel of death. In the midst of this kind of global pandemic, the only think we can really do is freak out.

I’ve been petrified since I first heard of the outbreak. I don’t even know how many people in the United States have succumbed. Hundreds? Thousands? As tragic as this all is in Africa, it’s even more terrifying here at home since we are all at risk. Clearly, the time for panic is not now; the time for panic was yesterday.

The risk factors for Ebola in the United States have a really low threshold. According to the CDC, you only need to have direct contact with the bodily fluid — vomit, stool, blood, etc. — of someone with the disease to catch it. This means I definitely can’t go to work for the duration. Most of our company just got back from a conference in Liberia and one of them might be infected and vomit in the hallway and then I’d slip and fall face-first into the vomit and catch Ebola.

But what can I do at home to prevent disease? My neighborhood is 90 percent immigrants from Sierra Leone and they’re always back and forth to that country. All it will take is one of those people to spit in my face in the grocery store and it’s Ebolarama for me.

There’s another risk factor for me. I don’t often discuss this but I like to travel around the country, sneak into the quarantine sections of hospitals and just sort of grope the patients. Sometimes I’ll even root through the red trash bags and play around with the needles I find there. I do this so much that I lose track of where I go so I may very well have been to that hospital in Texas.

I blame Obama.

So for now, it’s under the bed for me. At the first sign of a fever or headache, I’m heading straight to the emergency room. The stupidest thing I could do is just assume those symptoms are regular cold or flu. The people at the ER actually want you to come in at the first sign of trouble. They have special people standing around waiting for you. And you will be hailed as an American hero if you take steps to prevent the spread of disease.

It sounds dire but America is a strong country. We survived SARS and we’ll survive this.