ILLEGAL MIGRATION AND THE PANDEMIC THREAT. SHOULD WE WORRY?

Ebola and illegal immigrants, that’s a topic a growing number of people are talking about in the US. Is there a reason to be worried? Is there a risk of an outbreak in the US or any other country that is accepting illegals from places with a known risk?  Let’s look at this issue from a different perspective. Let’s look at how a true pandemic event would most likely take place and then I think you can come to your own conclusions. Let’s look at a few facts first.

Facts:

​Most of the illegal migration movements are taking place through a process that is not designed to monitor for pandemic threats. If someone boards a cargo ship and sails to a port in Central or South America, hidden away in some illegal fashion, the odds of the crew declaring those people are onboard is zero. 

​If you live in an area where there is an outbreak of a disease that can kill you and fear begins to rule the day, then you are going to attempt to leave. The intent to leave increases greatly when a rumor starts that people are not being allowed to leave….by the way… been there……seen that! Fear creates panic and panic grows the number of those attempting to leave. Where do you want to go? First off to a please that is safe from the threat and secondly, a place that has the ability to treat you if you do get sick. 

​Once you arrive near the area you are trying to get to, the last thing you want to do is let someone know you’re from a stricken location. By the way, let me inject some good news here. Boat rides like the ones I’m talking about are much longer than the incubation times of most deadly diseases. Whoops. Here is the bad news…………people can be carriers! Sorry.

Alright, without making the “how” process too lengthy, let me push on to my next point.

Response and History:

​Is the US ready for a true pandemic event? Well, that depends on what that event is. Just to have a starting point, let me go back to a story I was involved in as I attempt to paint a picture of “readiness”. Swine Flu in 2009. To say I was busy as that moment in time is an understatement. The idea that I needed to dedicate a percentage of my staff to a conference call about the flue seemed like overkill, but that is what I was told to do, so we did. That first day started with a call with several agencies and by the calls end, it seemed I was going to have to assign several members to the process. Well, over the course of the next few days, it became obvious this support concept would become the primary task for my staff. It seemed like the next day, all of us were 24/7 working on the issue of the growing threat of Swine Flu. What was the mortality rate projected to be? I don’t even remember, but I will tell you this some very scary concepts were being discussed at all levels, federal, state and local. Now, let me stop and digress for a minute. When I first retuned from the Middle East, back in 2003, one of my first assignments was to help the State of Texas prepare to achieve a “Green” status on CDC/ Center for Disease Control/ National Strategic Stockpile program. This was and is a program that is designed to combat pandemic events. Myself and a few of my Iron Majors, nicknames for midlevel Officers who can get just about anything done, sat in on planning meetings for months. At the end of the day, not only did we all understand what the national “plan” was, we thought we had a plan that might just work for the state of Texas. Folks, that was how I came to understand what was being talked about when the Swine Flu threat came into view. My staff and I began to listen to CDC and the states talk about events like, “Social Distancing”, Push Packages and Distribution points. It was one thing to have been in on the concept of planning for such an event but the reality of actually preparingfor these concepts was more than troubling. Over the course of the next few days, we had moved on to topics like, “The Immortals” and how these people would be identified in order to support the response process. By the way, “ The Immortals” are the people who get sick, but survive. We even planned on how to organize the Immortals inside our own forces. Scary stuff! 

​On the day the topic of closing public schools was about to be decided upon, at least in Texas, the reality of what would happen really took hold. If you close schools, people stay home. If people stay home, businesses close. If businesses close, the media, to include social media, creates a higher level of panic. Worse, if kids stay home, a percentage of First Responders don’t show up for work. People who make the sewer plants run, water and power, they all begin to be dramatically impacted. It became clear to most of us what the issue was going to be. The lethality rate was not the driving factor. The rumors and media hype would become the breaking point. Look, when you are in a series of daily calls that talk about chromosome jumps and airborne mutations, life gets real! Oh, by the way, the more people that are infected, the more mutation opportunities the virus gets, and the math is crazy. If that doesn’t drive you to the point of digging a whole to hide in, then you hear about “burnout rates” and “cooling off periods” before the virus comes back. By the beginning of the second week of the calls, we had to be careful who we had in the daily conversations given the anxiety levels it was creating and we are talking about troops who had been to war.

When it was all said and done, the virus failed to launch but it got close, so close the government was ready to implement what most would consider extreme measures. 

Side note: You don’t know the thought process of people until you tell them they could be in real trouble. Some of the sidebar conversations about how to prevent possible infected groups from traveling into other regions simply got ugly and I will leave it at that.

What does this all mean: 

​Should we be worried about the uncontrolled movement of large numbers of people from unknown places? How could we not be? Is there a process in place to check everyone that is pouring into other nations? Here is the reality. The US can have the best “plan” in the world but if other nations are not showing the commitment to watching for such an event, then that “plan” will not matter. The key to pandemic is early detection and then isolation. But and this is the huge but….if we can’t detect and isolate, then we must “Plan” for the failure of concept. Can the US stop a pandemic event from taking place? No. Can the US mitigate an event once it starts? Well folks, that’s a question of numbers and locations. By the way, where are all these people going that keep pouring into the US and other nations? Yep, they are going all over the place. Detection and Isolation in countless locations. That seems like a very…very risky assumption. Can the US and other countries check every ship that docks in a major port? No. Is the “detection” event going to take place where we don’t expect it? I hope not.