The
governors of New York and New Jersey announced Friday afternoon that
they were ordering all people entering the country through two area
airports who had direct contact with Ebola patients in Sierra Leone,
Liberia and Guinea to be quarantined.
The
announcement comes one day after an American doctor, who had worked in
Guinea and returned to New York City earlier in October, tested positive
for Ebola and became the first New York patient of the deadly virus.
“A
voluntary Ebola quarantine is not enough,” said Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of
New York. “This is too serious a public health situation.”
Outlined
in a late afternoon news conference, the new protocols raised a host of
questions about how, exactly, the screening process would work and who,
exactly, it would target. The two airports in question are Kennedy
International Airport and Newark Liberty International Airport.
The
rapid escalation of screening measures came as a surprise after a day
in which public officials had gone to great lengths to ease public
anxiety.
New York’s First Case of Ebola
Latest Developments
It was also taken without consulting the New York City health department, according to a senior city official.
Earlier
in the day, the White House sidestepped questions about whether a
quarantine of health care workers was being considered. Instead,
officials defended the procedures the administration has put in place,
including enhanced airport screenings and the monitoring of people
returning to the United States from Ebola-afflicted countries.
“I’m
not going to get into the ongoing deliberations of our public health
professionals,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, told
reporters on Friday.
“These
kind of policy decisions are going to be driven by science, and by the
best advice of our medical experts, and by our scientists that have four
decades of experience in dealing with Ebola outbreaks in West Africa.”
There
was immediate concern that the move might have an adverse effect on
getting workers to West Africa, where more than 4,500 people have died
of the virus and medical workers are in short supply.
Even
as the details about how the policy would work — and how they would
determine a person’s level of exposure to Ebola patients — a nurse
traveling to Newark Liberty International Airport was ordered
quarantined for three weeks, according to The Record newspaper in northern New Jersey, despite the fact that the individual displayed no signs of illness.
Gov.
Chris Christie of New Jersey said that the federal guidelines, which
starting Monday will require all people traveling to America from one of
the countries in West Africa where the disease is endemic to monitor
their own health and report those results to a local health worker, were
not strict enough.
“We
are no longer relying on C.D.C. standards,” Mr. Christie said,
referring to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In
New York City, disease investigators continue their search for anyone
who came into contact with the city’s first Ebola patient since Tuesday
morning, health officials said, adding they were acting out of an
abundance of caution to ensure that they find anyone who might have been
at risk of infection.
Three Quarantined in New York Ebola Case
Two friends and the fiancée of the
Manhattan doctor infected with Ebola have been quarantined, according to
officials at a news conference.
Publish Date October 24, 2014.
Photo by Associated Press.
Three
people who had contact with the patient, Dr. Craig Spencer, have been
quarantined, and investigators have compiled a detailed accounting of
his movements in the days before he was placed in isolation at Bellevue
Hospital on Thursday.
He
remains in stable condition and doctors are discussing the use of
various experimental treatments that might help him battle the virus.
Health officials said that initial reports were incorrect when they indicated that Dr. Craig Spencer, 33, had a 103-degree fever
when he notified authorities of his ill health on Thursday. He actually
had only a 100.3 fever. Officials attributed the mistake to a
transcription error and said the lower temperature made it highly
unlikely that he could have spread the disease before going to the
hospital. But they were tracing his contacts back to Tuesday, the day he
began feeling fatigued.
The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday that its
laboratory had confirmed a city laboratory’s finding, on Thursday, that
Dr. Spencer had the virus.
Dr.
Spencer had been working with Doctors Without Borders in Guinea,
treating Ebola patients, before leaving Africa on Oct. 14 and returning
to New York City on Oct. 17, according to a city official.
Since
March, three international staff members and 21 locally employed staff
members of the group have fallen ill while battling the Ebola outbreak
in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, according to the group. Thirteen
have died. Dr. Spencer is the first worker out of more than 700
expatriate staff members deployed so far to West Africa to develop
symptoms after returning home.
Dr.
Spencer was in stable condition on Friday, according to Dr. Mary T.
Bassett, the city’s health commissioner.. The moment he was given a
diagnosis, a discussion began about how best to treat him. Nearly all
the patients treated in the United States have received some form of
experimental treatment and doctors were discussing what, if any, of
those they will use. Doctors at Bellevue are consulting with experts at
Emory University Hospital and the University of Nebraska Medical Center,
both of which have successfully treated Ebola patients.
In other cases, victims have received plasma from the blood of an Ebola survivor in the hopes that antibodies in the blood of an Ebola victim may help fight the virus.
Health
officials said that Dr. Spencer reported his symptoms to authorities at
around 11 a.m. on Thursday and was transported to Bellevue Hospital
Center and put into isolation. He still had only a low grade fever.
Graphic
What the New York City Ebola Patient Was Doing Before He Was Hospitalized
Locations visited by Craig Spencer, a Manhattan doctor who has tested positive for Ebola.
As
a hazardous material team arrived at Dr. Spencer’s apartment in Harlem,
where they were going to sanitize the residence, public officials took
to the airwaves seeking to reassure wary residents that the risk to the
general public was exceedingly small.
“New
Yorkers who have not been exposed to an infected person’s bodily fluids
are simply not at risk,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news conference
Friday afternoon.
“We
have the finest public health system, not only anywhere in the country
but anywhere in the world,” he said. “We are fully ready to handle
Ebola.”
Much
of the public’s concern focused on the movements of the patient the
night before he reported feeling ill on Thursday morning.
On
Friday, officials added some new details about those movements. He
traveled on the A and L subway lines to Brooklyn, where he went bowling
in Williamsburg and took a taxi back to Manhattan on Wednesday evening.
He assured officials that he was not symptomatic at the time.
Earlier
in the day, he went for a three-mile jog along Riverside Drive. On
Tuesday — the day Dr. Spencer first began to feel sluggish, according to
what he told health investigators — he visited the High Line and ate a
meal at the Meatball Shop at 64 Greenwich Avenue. Health workers are in
the process of visiting every location Dr. Spencer visited, Dr. Bassett
said.
Dr.
Bassett said that while they believe the risk to the people Dr. Spencer
came into contact with before being placed in isolation was minimal,
the authorities were reaching out to anyone who had contact with Dr.
Spencer starting at 7 a.m. on Oct. 21, when he first felt slightly
unwell, “out of an abundance of caution.”
The
disease continues to spread, killing thousands in West Africa and
popping up in a growing number of cities around the world. On Friday,
federal health officials said they were considering stepping up
precautions to guard against new cases in this country even more.
The
Ebola virus can be transmitted to other people only through bodily
fluids when an infected individual begins to show symptoms. At the onset
of illness, the amount of virus in the body is generally low, so the
risk of infection is also considered small.
As the disease progresses, the amount of virus in the body multiplies and so does the risk of contagion.
The
initial report that Dr. Spencer’s temperature on Thursday was 103 set
off fears that he might have had a fever earlier, perhaps even when he
went bowling and traveled on the subway Wednesday. The news that his
fever was three degrees lower may assuage some of those fears.
The
question of exactly when Dr. Spencer started developing symptoms is
critical because the authorities want to find anyone he came into
physical contact with during this period, no matter how small the risk
of contagion.
Dr.
Spencer’s fiancée, Morgan Dixon, who lived with him, has been
quarantined at Bellevue Hospital. Two other friends whom he had contact
with have also been quarantined.
None of them have shown any symptoms of illness.
One
city official said the authorities used Dr. Spencer’s phone to track
his movements and potential contacts and to corroborate the account he
has given to health investigators. The official said that the doctor had
been very cooperative and that the information he had given had proven
very reliable. But the official noted that memory, particularly in
stressful situations, is an imperfect tool, and the doctor’s phone,
credit cards and other materials have been useful to fill out his
account.
Health
workers were scheduled to visit the bowling alley in Williamsburg,
Brooklyn, where Dr. Spencer bowled, when it opens at 2 p.m. on Friday.
They are not planning on cleaning the facility, but rather, interviewing
people there to be sure that he did not have any unknown contacts.
“There
is the pure science in terms of what we know and what can come from
that,” said Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of the National Center for
Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University and a special adviser to
Mayor de Blasio. “On the other end of the spectrum, there is the world
of abundance of caution. Public officials are constantly trying to find
the right balance.”
Soon
after Dr. Spencer was diagnosed with Ebola on Thursday, Governor Cuomo
and Mayor de Blasio participated in a conference call with federal,
state and local health officials to determine if they needed to take any
action regarding the subway cars on which Dr. Spencer rode on
Wednesday.
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