New Yorkers told not to panic after doctor diagnosed with Ebola virus
Print Edition
OFFICIALS tried to quell New Yorkers’ fears yesterday after a doctor was diagnosed with Ebola in the city.
“We want to state at the outset that New Yorkers have no reason to be alarmed,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio, even as officials described Dr Craig Spencer riding the subway, taking a cab and bowling since returning to New York from Guinea a week ago.
Heath officials have repeatedly given assurances the disease is spread only by direct contact with bodily fluids, and that the virus survives on dry surfaces for only a matter of hours.
They said Spencer, a member of Doctors Without Borders, had sought treatment with diarrhea and a fever and was being treated in an isolation ward at Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital, a designated Ebola center.
Governor Andrew Cuomo said the doctor “obviously felt he wasn’t symptomatic” when he went out “in a limited way.”
In a TV interview, he said there was no reason to fear riding the subway.
The epidemic in West Africa has killed about 4,800 people and more than 440 health workers have contracted Ebola — about half have died.
Four American aid workers, including three doctors, were infected with Ebola while working in Africa and were transferred to the US for treatment in recent months. All recovered. Health care workers are vulnerable because of close contact with patients when they are at their sickest and most contagious.
The first person diagnosed with the disease in the United States was a Liberian man who fell ill days after arriving in Dallas and later died, becoming the only fatality. None of his relatives who had contact with him got sick. Two nurses who treated him were infected and are hospitalized. The family of one nurse said doctors could no longer detect Ebola in her.
Health officials say the chances of the average New Yorker contracting Ebola are slim, but some were not taking any chances.
Yesterday morning, a group of teenage girls in Catholic school uniforms riding the subway passed around a bottle of hand sanitizer. They said they were taking extra precautions because of the Ebola case. They were on one of the subway lines the doctor took after returning home.
Health officials have been tracing Spencer’s contacts to identify anyone who may be at risk. The city’s health commissioner, Mary Bassett, said Spencer’s fiancee and two friends had been quarantined but showed no symptoms.
According to a timeline provided by city officials, in the days before Spencer fell ill, he went on a 5-kilometer jog, went to High Line park, rode the subway and, on Wednesday night, got a taxi to a Brooklyn bowling alley. He had felt tired on Tuesday, and was worse by Thursday, when he and his fiancee called authorities.
Emergency medical staff in full Ebola gear took him to Bellevue in an ambulance surrounded by police squad cars.
Bassett said the probability was “close to nil” that Spencer’s subway rides would pose a risk. Still, the bowling alley was closed as a precaution, and Spencer’s Harlem apartment was cordoned off.
Spencer, 33, works at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center but had not seen any patients or been to the hospital since his return, the hospital said in a statement, calling him a “dedicated humanitarian” who “went to an area of medical crisis to help a desperately underserved population.”
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