The crazies and the Ebola scare

There are 50+ countries in Africa. There are more than a billion people who live in Africa. There are less than 10,000 people infected with Ebola. That comes to 0.001% of the population of Africa. There is mass hysteria about Ebola and people are fearful of travelling to Africa. We have all these crazies (Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Geraldo Rivera, Joe Scarborough, Chris Wallace, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and the list goes on) advocating stopping flights from Western Africa. Freaking crazies!!

Did you know that there are 73 weekly flights from West Africa to Paris, 43 to London, 37 to Dubai, 36 to Istanbul, 26 to Brussels, 26 to Frankfurt, 22 to Lisbon, 16 to Amsterdam? Guess how many Ebola patients are in France, UK, UAE, Turkey, Belgium, Germany, Portugal, Netherlands combined. You guessed it: ZERO!

Let’s put things in perspective here:

  • Your odds of eventually dying: 100.000%
  • Your odds of dying from heart disease or cancer: 14.285%
  • Your odds of dying from chronic lower respiratory disease: 3.448%
  • Your odds of dying from intentional self-harm: 0.971%
  • Your odds of dying from unintentional poisoning and exposure to noxious substance: 0.840%
  • Your odds of dying from a fall: 0.658%
  • Your odds of dying because of a firearm: 0.281%
  • Your odds of dying by car accident: 0.203%
  • Your odds of dying from drowning: 0.095%
  • Your odds of dying in a plane crash: 0.012%

No, I did not make these up. These numbers are from the National Safety Council. Based on this, let’s not breathe (lest we get lung cancer), let’s not own or use guns (that is just common sense), let’s not get into a car, let’s not go near water, let’s not fly; basically, let’s stop living. Oh, and if you are going to stop living, you must visit Africa. I have only been to South Africa, but to me, it is the center of the universe.

The video on this blog is a good sampling of birds we saw in less than 2 weeks. There are dozens of other gorgeous birds that I couldn’t capture on video. I hope you enjoy this; because if you listen to the news, we are going to soon have 10,000 cases of Ebola per week. Freaking crazies!!

As for my workout today, I ran for 50 minutes on the treadmill. It was tiny interval day (5×30 seconds with 4 minutes easy in between).

Leave a Reply