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ChristianKl comments on [Link] The Coming Plague - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm saying that Liberia is not the only country with Ebola.
If a country can expect a travel ban when it shares information about an epidemic in that country it might prefer to keep that epidemic from being public knowledge.
Good luck covering up these kinds of epidemics.
You won't be able to cover up every epidemic. But you can cover up a handful cases.
Even if you fail to really cover up those case it might add a time lag of a week till the WHO and the CDC have information, which means that they can respond less efficiently to the thread.
If you want to get people to change their burial rituals it's also important that you have trust. If you use travel bans in a way that suggest that you don't care about the local health then you don't have that trust. You can't give people vaccines when they don't trust you.
Given the low risk we Westerns face from Ebola, the trust is simply worth more. It's highly valuable in case an pandemic comes along that actually does threaten us.
The Coase theorem would seem to come into play here. We should be able to pay West African nations enough to compensate them for any harm of a travel ban.
We could make that payment in kind, too, to avoid the possibility of money going straight into the rulers' pockets. That payment in kind could be in the form of health workers and equipment going there to help fight the outbreak.
Which...is happening.
I'm not sure this would fully solve the problem Christian mentions in the second half of his comment. The problem is that trust is priceless, which may impose very high transaction costs.