Panic at Home!
Well, maybe not panic… Maybe it was something else.
I was at home last Thursday minding my own business, reading and writing emails and watching the ticker symbols, when I clicked into the Washington Post and got a fun little surprise.
Nina Pham, the 26-year-old nurse who contracted Ebola while treating the disease’s first American fatality, Thomas Eric Duncan, was coming to visit my town.
More specifically, she was coming to visit the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda — which is about three miles from my house.
I immediately started sending the article around to my online friends and work contacts (most of whom lived within 50 miles of the NIH), and the responses were almost universal.
“Oh my god!”
“I’m getting out of town!”
“I hope you have a hazmat suit!”
And so on…
I had to chuckle at the whole thing. Let’s face it — the biggest story here isn’t a deadly exotic virus that turns your guts to liquid.
It’s a media-driven panic whirlwind that takes every errant fact, photo, and rumor and adds it to the grand jigsaw puzzle.
And the effects of this whirlwind haven’t exactly been subtle…
For an illustration of what whipped-up panic does to the real world, just look how hazmat suit producer Lakeland Industries (NASDAQ: LAKE) and protective apparel manufacturer Alpha Pro Tech (NYSE: APT) traded last week.
And it doesn’t stop at Wall Street, either. D.C. gets swept up into it just as fast.
Obama just named an “Ebola Czar,” for Pete’s sake.
Isn’t managing, containing, and ending this crisis what the CDC is supposed to be doing?
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Plan While Everyone Else Panics, and You Will Win
Now, I’m not saying there’s no cause for concern. The introduction of any exotic life form — be it a virus, an insect, or an animal — into a new environment always presents a risk.
But I like to err on the side of reason when dealing with these situations.
Instead of panicking, I decided to research the problem a bit. And guess what? I actually discovered a technology that could have made most of the current uncertainties stemming from the protocol breaches in Dallas nonfactors.
There is a company out there now that markets RFID networks designed to track every single moving part within a hospital.
Every staff member, every patient, every bed, and every piece of equipment that’s not bolted down.
The system is capable of keeping track of the movements of every person and object tagged with its special locator chips and analyzing this data to determine who was in contact with whom, where, and when.
While CDC analysts spend days frantically piecing together detailed time lines of where everyone who made direct contact with patient zero went in the subsequent hours, this real-time tracking system would have generated a detailed, all-inclusive report in fractions of a second, leaving nothing to chance.
The potential benefits of such a system far exceed any that we’d get from hugely complicated, expensive mandates like screening every inbound traveler at the U.S. border, halting travel altogether, or creating new task forces and committees on how to solve this whole thing.
It’s inexpensive; it’s fully scalable and adaptable to facilities of all sizes; it’s proven to work; and, to top it off, this infection-tracking function is just one of many benefits the system brings to a hospital.
Its main purpose is to increase efficiency of movement and to optimize response times to emergency calls based on accurate real-time location of personnel.
So this added feature is just icing.
I know you probably want the name of this company right now, but I’ve just started to research it for an upcoming report — which I’m now rushing into production given recent events.
Keeps your eyes peeled for it in the coming weeks.
Fortune favors the bold,
Alex Koyfman
Check us out on YouTube!His flagship service, Microcap Insider, provides market-beating insights into some of the fastest moving, highest profit-potential companies available for public trading on the U.S. and Canadian exchanges. With more than 5 years of track record to back it up, Microcap Insider is the choice for the growth-minded investor. Alex contributes his thoughts and insights regularly to Energy and Capital. To learn more about Alex, click here.
