Liberia Loses Track of Ebola Patients

The Washington Post must be chock full of racists. Why else is that paper running such a negative story about the state of the healthcare system in Liberia?

MONROVIA, Liberia — For the 29th day, Linda Wilson came to the gates of the Ebola treatment center looking for her best friend, the woman whose picture she carried in her purse, so she could show it to guards or nurses or anyone else who might be able to help.

“Have you seen her?” Wilson asked them.

For the 29th day, the answer was no. Barbara Bai’s name was not on any list, even though she was admitted to a hospital one month earlier. There was no record of her death or her survival at any hospital in Monrovia. She was one of the many people who have simply vanished as Ebola tears through the city.

Ebola ravaged this capital so quickly that some patients passed through an already broken medical system with hardly any paper trail. Others were admitted to one clinic and transferred to another without notice. Hundreds were cremated long before their families were notified that they had died.

That sounds uncomfortably like the Veterans Administration under Obama. Which makes me a racist for pointing that out.

Relatives and friends spend hours each day outside the city’s four Ebola clinics. Some come to pray. Many are not sure if they’re in the right place.

They wait for visiting hours, held in special partitioned spaces, even though the loved ones they are looking for never show up. They check patient lists, even though they’re almost always incomplete.

As long as there remain open flights from the Ebola-stricken countries to the United States, we are depending on those countries’ record-keeping systems to keep us safe. It’s not like our own government has any interest in doing that job.