<p>“Granted that now the alert is out at hospitals, but even the CDC is still contradictory, compared to its boss. Until the CDC and government in general gets their story straight, it is fanciful, in my view, to have expected a couple employees at a hospital to be perfectly all over the first case in the country.”</p>
<p>I have to respectfully disagree with you. Mount Sinai Hospital in NYC knew exactly what to do way back in early August. </p>
<p>^I agree with a lot of this. But I have a hard time understanding the lack of concern for this patient when his fever spiked, or why the doctor–a higher authority than the nurse–would mark his chart “negative for fever and chills.”</p>
<p>So, what are we to make of that? They expected the first US case to land at JFK? Great. It’s not exactly reassuring to have health officials hiring fake Ebola patients. Sigh.</p>
<p>“So, what are we to make of that? They expected the first US case to land at JFK? Great. It’s not exactly reassuring to have health officials hiring fake Ebola patients. Sigh.”</p>
<p>No, they just said what would be done if suspected ebola patient(s) came through JFK. </p>
<p>What is wrong with testing the hospitals to see how they respond to a suspected case? Maybe if this had been done in Dallas area hospitals, Dallas Ebola guy wouldn’t have been sent home when he was. </p>
<p>Right. And scrutiny of what went wrong tells us where the holes are. Every smart hospital around the country is studying Texas Presbyterian’s missteps. </p>
This is prudent and reassuring because of how large the Liberian population is on Staten Island and how ill-equipped our hospitals are to deal with such an outbreak.</p>
<p>What do ERs do when someone sick shows up? Was the way Duncan treated unusual other than it was Ebola? Why did Duncam deny he was in contact with sick people? Why didn’t he say he was in contact with a malaria patient if that’s what he thought the dying woman had? </p>
<p>Staten Island is known to have the largest Liberian population outside of Africa (6000-7000 according to wikipedia) but other sources I found say that Dallas has 10,000.</p>
<p>For what feels like the 90th time, Josephus Weeks, who lives in NC, is a NEPHEW. Mr. Duncan’s half-brother, Wilfrid Smallwood, lives in Arizona. Mr. Weeks says he called the CDC after Mr. Duncan was taken to the hospital and he seemed to be in the regular ER and not being treated as carefully–ie, isolated–as Weeks thought he should be, given that now it seemed likely that he had Ebola.</p>
<p>I simply cannot believe that people here cannot get the simplest facts straight, and yet persist in condemning the family for doing things that they didn’t do, or for doing them at a time that they didn’t do it. The great irony is those who insist that these people aren’t really family, but cannot seem to keep the family relationships straight.</p>
<p>It now appears that there may have been some problems with consent to treat because of the supposed lack of family and withholding of information, presumably due to HIPAA. It’s not surprising that the family is upset, given everything that has happened, although I think that the things that at least his nephew suspects are not warranted.</p>
<p>BTW, his medical records have been released, and I read that his temp on his FIRST visit to the hospital was noted as 103 with exclamation points. I also read that the physician ordered CT scans and possibly other tests looking for appendicitis or stroke or something else, which disproves the idea that they didn’t want to spend money on him because he was uninsured.</p>
<p>Although it is not transmitted person to person, there are malaria prone areas. If his nieghbor got malaria, he could have gottn it, too. Apparently, symptoms are similar.</p>
<p>The fact that he had been in West Africa, which was in the triage nurse’s notes available to the doctor, would have served to alert them to malaria as a possibility.</p>
<p>It is sad and ironic that the doctor(s) apparently ran a number of tests looking for things that weren’t there, but didn’t see the obvious. And hadn’t the hospital <em>just had</em> Ebola training?</p>
<p>“Josephus Weeks, who lives in NC, is a NEPHEW. Mr. Duncan’s half-brother, Wilfrid Smallwood, lives in Arizona. Mr. Weeks says he called the CDC”</p>
<p>My apologies for getting the relationship wrong and calling Weeks his half brother. I don’t think it makes that much difference, however, in what happened/didn’t happen. But Week’s call to the CDC was after he was taken by ambulance to the hospital - 2 days after he had been sent home. </p>
<p>“Why did Duncan deny he was in contact with sick people? Why didn’t he say he was in contact with a malaria patient if that’s what he thought the dying woman had?”</p>
<p>I have no idea why he wouldn’t say he was in contact with a malaria patient, but if he knew he had been exposed to Ebola - which a lot of people believe, and that he came to the US because his only chance of survival would be in a US hospital- why didn’t he tell the hospital he may have been exposed to Ebola - if that was his chance to get treated? </p>
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