As the Ebola scare appears to be fast taking hold of America, aided in good measure by cable television’s saturation coverage, President Barack Obama has promised a more aggressive response with deployment of SWAT teams, stricter adherence to safety protocols and proper use and disposal of protective equipment by health care personnel.
The assurance by Obama that a “serious outbreak” of Ebola was extremely unlikely in the US came in the face of a series of missteps in dealing with the handful of cases that its health personnel have had to deal with so far.
Beginning with the mishandling of the affliction of Thomas Eric Duncan, the liberian national who was initially turned away by the Texas hospital where he subsequently died and became the first Ebola casualty on American soil, there have been protocol breaches leading to at least two nurses contracting the deadly virus and raising doubts about the safety of individuals who may have come in contact with them.
Concerns mounted rapidly on Wednesday when it became known that the second nurse who tested positive for Ebola had been allowed by a US health official to take a commercial flight from Cleveland to Dallas, despite reporting that she had a slight fever (99.5 F). This happened barely 24 hours before her Ebola diagnosis at the Texas Presbyterian Hospital, Dallas.
The news triggered alarm, prompting the head of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to say she should not have boarded a commercial flight. The 130-odd passengers who travelled by that crowded Frontier Airlines flight are being monitored now.
At the same time, CDC Director Thomas Frieden said chances of other passengers being infected were very low as the nurse, Amber Vinson, did not vomit on the flight and was not bleeding. The plane itself was taken out of service for cleaning, and its two pilots and four flight attendants were put on a paid 21-day leave of absence as a precaution.
Vinson was on Wednesday night shifted to the Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, a better-equipped facility that had successfully cured two American Ebola victims, contracted while on a health care mission in liberia. Both Vinson and the other nurse, Nina Pham, who is currently being treated at the Texas hospital, had both attended to Duncan, the liberian Ebola victim, when he was being treated at the facility. Pham is said to be “in good condition”.
Questions have been raised if the two nurses had been property trained about donning the protective wear, given that a large number of health workers serving in the worst Ebola-hit nations of liberia, Sierra leone and Guinea have not contracted the virus. But the nurses’ association, National Nurses United, complained that the Texas hospital lacked protocols to deal with an Ebola patient.
There were also reports that the nurses would not report for work in the present circumstances. This was believed to be the main reason for shifting Vinson to Atlanta.
Speaking to reporters just before an urgent Cabinet meeting to take stock of the situation, President Obama said the likelihood of a widespread Ebola outbreak was “very, very low”.
“I want people to understand that the dangers of you contracting Ebola, the dangers of a serious outbreak, are extraordinarily low, but we are taking this very seriously at the highest levels of government,” Obama said.
While reassuring Americans that Ebola is transmitted not by way of sneezes or coughs, but by direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected patient, he sought to drive home the point by referring to his own close contact with a couple of nurses who had been treated at the Atlanta facility earlier on. “I shook hands with, hugged and kissed, not the doctors, but a couple of the nurses at Emory,” Obama said, adding: “They followed the protocols, they knew what they were doing, and I felt perfectly safe doing so.”