By Nicholas Stix
Why did Doctors Without Borders not make its member, Dr. Spencer, undergo the standard 21-day quarantine before letting him mingle in the general population, and why did Spencer not take any precautions upon returning from tending to Ebola patients in Guinea?
Note how all authority figures keep giving us ever shakier assurances about how difficult it is to get Ebola, yet health care workers and doctors like Spencer are getting it, no matter how many precautions they undertake.
From Guinea to the U.S.: Timeline of first Ebola patient in New York City
By Faith Karimi
updated 2:54 P.M. EDT, Fri October 24, 2014
CNN
(CNN) -- A doctor who recently returned from Guinea has tested positive for Ebola -- the first case of the deadly virus in New York City and the fourth diagnosed in the United States.
Here is a timeline of Craig Spencer's movements since he got back from the West African nation:
When did he return from Guinea?
Spencer came back to the United States last week after treating Ebola patients in Guinea, where he worked for Doctors Without Borders. He
completed his work in Guinea on October 12 and left the country two days later via Brussels, Belgium.
Spencer posted this image to Facebook on September 18, saying, "Off to Guinea with Doctors Without Borders (MSF)."
He arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport on October 17, but he exhibited no symptoms of the virus until Thursday morning, said Dr. Mary Travis Bassett, New York City's health commissioner.
The physician, who works at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, was checking his temperature twice a day. He has not seen any patients since his return.
Did he have any symptoms?
The 33-year-old did not have any symptoms just after his return, but he developed a fever, nausea, pain and fatigue Thursday morning, authorities said. He began feeling sluggish a couple of days ago, but his fever spiked to 100.3 degrees Fahrenheit (about 38 Celsius) the day his symptoms appeared.
How many people has he been in contact with?
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Spencer was in contact with a few people after he started exhibiting symptoms, authorities said. Ebola isn't contagious until someone has symptoms.
Three people -- his fiancée and two friends -- are being placed on quarantine and monitored, health officials said.
"They are all well at this time; none of them is sick," Bassett said.
Bassett provided a more detailed timeline of where Spencer has been since Tuesday, which is when she says he began to feel fatigued, though without a fever.
On Tuesday, he visited a coffee stand at the High Line -- a park built on a former elevated rail line on Manhattan's West Side -- and a Meatball Shop restaurant in Manhattan, she said. On Wednesday, he took a 3-mile run along Riverside Drive and his neighborhood, and took the subway to visit the Gutter bowling alley in Brooklyn, she said. He wasn't symptomatic until Thursday, when he had a low-grade fever between 10 and 11 a.m., officials said.
The bowling alley closed Thursday as a precaution, but it said that health officials have determined there are no risks to customers.
[Yeah, right.]
The Gutter bowling alley said in a statement Friday that it was working with the city health department to "have the bar cleaned and sanitized" as a precautionary measure and expected to open later in the day.
[Will Spencer or Doctors Without Borders pay for that? I didn’t think so.]
Both the coffee stand and the bowling alley were assessed and cleared by health officials. The Meatball Shop was expected to reopen Friday evening.
Complete coverage on Ebola
Spencer also traveled on three subway lines. "At the time that the doctor was on the subway, he did not have fever ... he was not symptomatic," Bassett said. Chances of anyone contracting the virus from contact with him are "close to nil," she said.
[Says yet another public official with zero credibility.]
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New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told CNN's "New Day" that the transit system was safe. He said he would ride the subway Friday.
"The MTA New York City Subway system is safe to ride," the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the nation's largest public transit network, said in a statement, adding that the agency has "existing protocols for cleaning potentially infectious waste such as bodily fluids from anywhere" in the transit system.
How the Ebola virus spreads
Is the hospital equipped to handle Ebola cases?
Spencer is at New York's Bellevue Hospital Center, where he has been in isolation since emergency personnel took him there.
It's one of eight hospitals statewide designated by Cuomo as part of an Ebola preparedness plan.
"We are as ready as one could be," Cuomo said. His state will be different from Texas, he said, where a Liberian man was diagnosed with Ebola and two nurses who treated him later contracted the virus. The man, Thomas Eric Duncan, died October 8.
"We had the advantage of learning from the Dallas experience," he said.
[And what did you learn? Nothing!]
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How will his case be different from Duncan's?
Duncan, who had flown from Liberia to Dallas, was the first person diagnosed with the disease in the United States. Two nurses who helped care for him also [were infected] underwent treatment, raising concerns about the nation's ability to deal with an outbreak.
[They “underwent treatment,” because they were infected, but CNN doesn’t want to say that.]
One of the Dallas nurses, Nina Pham, has been declared free of the Ebola virus, the National Institutes of Health said Friday.
Pham appeared at a NIH news conference in Maryland, where she thanked Dr. Kent Brantly, the American physician who also survived Ebola, for donating his plasma to her while she was sick. She also thanked God, her family, friends and the medical professionals who treated her.
"I feel fortunate and blessed to be standing here today," she told reporters.
NIH's Dr. Anthony Fauci said, "She has no virus in her. She feels well."
Pham said it will be awhile before she has her strength back and asked for privacy "as I return to Texas and try to get back to a normal life."
The other nurse, Amber Vinson, "is making good progress in her treatment for Ebola virus infection," Emory University Hospital physicians said in a statement with the CDC on Friday.
"Tests no longer detect virus in her blood," the statement said. "She remains within Emory's Serious Communicable Diseases Unit for continued supportive care. We do not have a discharge date at this time."
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said his city followed every protocol in its handling of Spencer's case.
For starters, Spencer was admitted to a hospital as soon as he developed symptoms, unlike Duncan, who was sent home with antibiotics the first time he went to Texas Presbyterian Hospital. Duncan returned days later and was hospitalized.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has dispatched a team to New York to help with the case.
"We want to state at the outset there is no reason for New Yorkers to be alarmed," the mayor said.
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What about his neighbors?
Spencer's Manhattan apartment has been isolated and locked.
[But why? Don't officials keep telling us how hard it is to catch this thing?!]
City health department workers canvassed the neighborhood, distributing information about Ebola and slipping fliers under doors, said Eugene Upshaw, who lives in Spencer's building.
The handbills, which read "Ebola: Am I at risk?" explain the virus, its symptoms and how you can get it.
"What we're doing now is just telling the folks who live here in the neighborhood that they're safe. It's safe for them to be in their buildings, it's safe for them to go to their apartments, it's safe for them to walk down the street," said Sam Miller, associate commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
Ebola is spread by direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person. The outbreak has killed nearly 5,000 people, mostly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
How many Ebola cases have been diagnosed in the U.S.?
Spencer is the fourth person diagnosed with Ebola in the United States. After Duncan, who was infected in his native Liberia before being diagnosed in Dallas, two nurses treating him later tested positive.
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Have there been other cases involving Americans?
Yes.
Five other Americans have been diagnosed with Ebola in West Africa and later transferred to the U.S. for treatment. They were treated and discharged from hospitals in Atlanta and Omaha, Nebraska.
An additional American died of Ebola in July after traveling to Nigeria from Liberia.
CNN's Miguel Marquez, Ray Sanchez and Shimon Prokupecz contributed to this report.
2 comments:
They like to work on behalf of third worlders because they get that noble feeling. I wonder if they'd help me out for free were I to need it? Or perhaps adulation from non-whites is what they crave.
This Spencer sounds like a do-gooder that now is in big trouble.
And over 200 medical personnel have died from the disease. I doubt all of them were violating protocols.
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