My neighbor burned his yard signs this morning.

[Warren DeMontague]

161. There's a lot of noise and misinformation about "travel bans".

The sensible stuff I've heard involves suspending the outstanding 10,000 or so travel visas the State Dept. has already issued to citizens of the 3 countries where transmission is currently out of control. No flights would need to be cancelled, No direct impact on movement of humanitarian supplies, etc. Our people who go over there to help would still be able to get back, although probably sensible monitoring and observation of them for 3 weeks is warranted.

Here's a good example- Nigeria. Everyone talks about how Nigeria "got ebola under control", and they did, awesome. But they had one guy fly in from Liberia, Patrick Sawyer, who infected a bunch of others, who infected still more others- and it was touch and go for a while, both in Lagos and Port Harcourt- huge cities. When Sawyer flew into Nigeria, they did not have restrictions on entry of visitors from the 3 main countries, they DO now.

Most of Africa has restrictions, border closings, etc. Hell, even inside Liberia and Sierra Leone there are quarantine zones- THEY want to control movement of people out of heavily infected areas, and through these measures they have kept at least one district in Liberia totally free of ebola.

So to suggest that somehow it is unfair of us to restrict entry from countries where transmission is out of control, when that's something even they themselves engage in... it's a little specious.

And I suspect that if we get a couple more people with ebola over here on visas, there will be some restrictions. Absolutely. But right now the foot dragging is costing us votes, no question. Because according to the recent WaPo poll, 67% of Americans support restrictions like I've outlined above. That number is only going to go up if we get more cases.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/10/14/americans-want-flight-restrictions-from-ebola-countries-and-its-not-close/