{"id":6164,"date":"2014-08-07T17:53:14","date_gmt":"2014-08-07T23:53:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=6164"},"modified":"2014-08-07T17:53:14","modified_gmt":"2014-08-07T23:53:14","slug":"can-everyone-take-a-deep-breath-please","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2014\/08\/07\/can-everyone-take-a-deep-breath-please\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Everyone Take a Deep Breath, Please?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve seen a number of panicky Facebook posts and tweets about the Ebola crisis today, no doubt fueled by the news that a couple victims of that dread disease are now here in the U.S. instead of safely isolated on the other side of the world, and &#8212; I have to be honest &#8212; they&#8217;ve really annoyed me. Yes, Ebola <em>is<\/em> scary shit, and the idea of a pandemic wiping out the human race is one of my deepest fears, even worse than my worries about a nuclear holocaust followed by an army of <a href=\"http:\/\/vimeo.com\/42586455\">chromium skeletons<\/a> systematically exterminating the survivors. (Seriously, I grew up in the latter days of the Cold War, when Ronnie Ray-Gun had his finger on The Button and every third movie, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Day_After\">TV show<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/youtu.be\/BLEogB8sVGc\">pop song<\/a> was telling us we were all going to die in a planetwide crop of mushroom clouds; I jest because I remember what that fear was <em>really<\/em> like.) But everybody needs to take a deep breath and apply some rational thought to this Ebola thing.<\/p>\n<p>The truth is, Ebola is actually pretty hard to contract, and the odds of it breaking out in any serious way in the United States &#8212; let alone turning into something out of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Stand\"><em>The Stand<\/em> <\/a>&#8212; are extremely long. The Centers for Disease Control website has a lot of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cdc.gov\/vhf\/ebola\/index.html?s_cid=cdc_homepage_feature_001\">good information<\/a> on the subject; the CDC has also produced a calming infographic, which I&#8217;m just going to leave here&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/CDC_ebola_infographic_680x902-1.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-6165\" alt=\"CDC_ebola_infographic_680x902\" src=\"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/CDC_ebola_infographic_680x902-1.jpg\" width=\"680\" height=\"902\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/CDC_ebola_infographic_680x902-1.jpg 680w, https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/CDC_ebola_infographic_680x902-1-226x300.jpg 226w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;re welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve seen a number of panicky Facebook posts and tweets about the Ebola crisis today, no doubt fueled by the news that a couple victims of that dread disease are now here in the U.S. instead of safely isolated on the other side of the world, and &#8212; I have to be honest &#8212; they&#8217;ve [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-something-that-bugs-me"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6164\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}