Sooner or later you just had to know Ebola would come to New York.
The story about the disease kept getting bigger and bigger.
And so it has, flying in from Guinea with an idealistic young doctor doing his best to save lives in that stricken country. It traveled on the subway, in a taxi, visited a Brooklyn bowling alley.
It got around.
The reaction was immediate, with tabloid TV and newspapers going to their highest level of defcon alert.
Friday's front page: Ebola is in New York City. http://t.co/sdILuvrSBd Why did he go bowling? http://t.co/0kRewG5rol pic.twitter.com/S0dBTvMIQo
— New York Daily News (@NYDailyNews) October 24, 2014
People who didn't know their ass from their Ebola were suddenly experts.
It is only a matter of time before some bible thumper says New York is Sodom and deserves the plague.
The Daily News really seemed to go overboard, showing pictures of commuters wearing masks, though I loved the tweet from someone saying they were happy because they’d be sure to get a subway seat for Friday's commute.
Ebola in NYC - well, I'm looking forward to my seat on the subway during tomorrow's rush hour. #ebola #nyc
— Matt Regan (@nymattregan) October 24, 2014
That is so New York: ballsy, funny in the face of adversity.
Now that Ebola has come it will find tough opponents in New Yorkers. We are not liable to panic, as we proved after 9/11. Quite the opposite in fact, we keep calm and carry on – and we fight back.
Still it was a scary movie come true to life. It was like that movie “The Andromeda Strain” with a killer bug on the loose.
I am in London and took a cab this morning and discovered overnight how my beloved city has undergone an unfortunate metamorphosis.
Usually when you say you’re from New York the driver chats away about the glories of the Big Apple.
This time the response was markedly different.
“Not such a good place to be from mate.”
Of course I mentally retraced the subway and taxi trips the doctor had taken and wondered who had been close to him.
I could only imagine millions of New Yorkers were doing the same, wondering just about who they were sitting close to on the subway and did they use that same Uber driver.
Sure the chances are small, but I kept thinking of what Doctor Nancy Sullivan had told me about Ebola after I interviewed her.
She had been named in the Wall Street Journal as the person closest to finding a vaccine. She stated how lack of transportation infrastructure had held down previous Ebola outbreaks in countries such as Congo.
Then you think of New York, the greatest transit city in the world with millions coming and going.
But we are up for it like we were up for Sandy, 9/11 and so many natural disasters.
This one is different and requires hyper vigilance, but let’s send a message to Ebola.
“Fuggedaboutit — you won’t make it here.”
Scram, in other words.
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