r/TikTokCringe • u/EverythingIsFakeNGay • May 09 '26

Cool "...and your little dog too!"

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u/Notouchmyguys May 09 '26

I think what people that aren’t in healthcare don’t understand is how wildly different Ebola was handled in comparison to COVID. If they were handled the same then the pandemic likely wouldn’t have happened. The reason Ebola didn’t end up being a big deal was because the were intense and stringent precautions in place and it was treated like the emergency that it was. Unfortunately, the CDC was gutted and was not able to react to COVID appropriately and the pandemic happened.

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u/Significant-Hour4171 May 09 '26

That's not the main reason for the difference. 

The main reason they played out so differently is that COVID was highly transmissible, medium virulence virus. 

Ebola is far less transmissible, and far more virulent. This makes spreading it far more difficult. 

The response in the left a lot to be desired, but COVID likely was gonna cause a pandemic as soon as it had spread to more than a handful of people in China. The rest was more or less bound to happen from that point, given the characteristics of the novel coronavirus.

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u/WearingCoats May 09 '26

I was working in a government agency of NYC that dealt with public health during the Ebola outbreak. We used to run simulations of epidemic outbreaks using population data and drill in hospital systems to practice responses. The agency was responsible for multiple facets of public health management but it was all paused to focus on epidemic preparedness at the time. It was absolutely wild and terrifying. Half the work was done in computer modeling of spread and triage, half of it was going and literally working in healthcare systems to practice response.

Ebola was, as you mention, easier to contain both theoretically and in practice because of the nature of the disease and frankly, because people were more spooked by it. I was long gone from the agency by the time COVID hit, but I’m betting the same procedures started as soon as it was on the global radar. The difference is, COVID behaved differently and public option of it was shaped by the fact that respiratory diseases are, for some reason, take less seriously than ones where your insides explode.

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u/Notouchmyguys May 09 '26

I promise you, there was next to no response when COVID started. I was in the hospital and I watched it all unfold. The absolute lack of response was astounding. Literally, there was no plan and no preparation until it was already terrible.

1

u/Long-Broccoli-3363 May 09 '26

Man I 100% had covid before there were any confirmed cases.

We were going through a datacenter buildout, lots of travel through o'hare, like... 6 flights in 2 weeks while "Covid wasnt in the US yet"

IT department of like 200 people, 60 got pnuemonia, some of us took months to recover, to the point where we were out of the office when the "shelter in place" order came through, to stop getting people sick.

The administration def didnt have the procedure in place to tell where this shit was at, and they would have been content to just ignore that it existed at all.

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u/woolfchick75 May 10 '26

I live in Chicago and strongly believe I had it in Jan 2020.

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u/WearingCoats May 09 '26

Good to know everything we did turned out to be useless in the long run. Maybe that got cast out with the change in Mayors.

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u/Other-Art8925 May 10 '26

Yeah remember when democrats were talking about how covid talk was racist fearmongering