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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsEbola Patient's Sequestered Relatives Moving to Undisclosed Location
Four relatives of the Texas Ebola patient who have been confined to their Dallas apartment are being moved to an undisclosed location, according to a Dallas city official.
The four people are going to be moved later today, according to Sana Syed, a spokesperson for the city of Dallas.
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Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said today that he visited the apartment Thursday night to apologize to the residents for keeping them in the apartment despite Duncan's diagnosis. He said that he told them that he wanted to make sure that they were treated as well as he would expect his own family to be treated.
Jenkins said that the sheets, clothes and other potentially infected items that Duncan used are bagged and being stored in one of the apartment's two bedrooms with the door closed.
<snip>
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/ebola-patients-sequestered-relatives-moving-undisclosed-location/story?id=25948830
really hoping none of these folks get sick.
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Stardust
(3,894 posts)were white. It shocks me that there aren't plans in place to deal with this eventuality. Compelling a woman with three children to remain in an apartment with one room that's closed off but contaminated with a deadly virus for three weeks while the Red Cross brings them food is unconscionable. I applaud the judge for his compassion.
Louisiana1976
(3,962 posts)But what can you expect from Texas which after all is a Red state?
pnwmom
(108,959 posts)and secure Duncan's car.
How this is supposed to make sense I do not know.
Barack_America
(28,876 posts)...as to what Duncan was in contact with?
pnwmom
(108,959 posts)
uppityperson
(115,677 posts)B2G
(9,766 posts)too fucking late.
If they get ebola they should sue everyone they can get their hands on.
LostInAnomie
(14,428 posts)That knowingly had contact with ebola, then lied about it so he could come to the US.
I bet that doesn't happen though.
cwydro
(51,308 posts)for a few hours. Wondering when.
Yesterday the hazmat crews were "on the way" forever. Then stymied.
They're making this up as they go along. Those poor folks.
kestrel91316
(51,666 posts)isolation instructions, I also think they should have been taken to clean premises for holding and monitoring rather than staying in the apartment with virus that might have stayed alive until it finally got cleaned.
They cannot consider the 21 day isolation over until 21 days after the LAST EXPOSURE to Ebola virus, which was yesterday or even today. To count from last Sunday is to assume all virus on the premises was dead and there was zero chance of infection at that point. Bad assumption.
pnwmom
(108,959 posts)kestrel91316
(51,666 posts)They don't like being told what to do by the feds so they will do the bare minimum. They were probably HOPING those folks would catch ebola by staying in that apartment.
TorchTheWitch
(11,065 posts)I can't understand how it is that they're bumbling through this on their own without a clue. They should have immediately been on the phone to the CDC to find out what they should do from the first. God, the West African countries are doing a better job of this!
I had thought that all of the people that came into contact with him like any of the nurses or doctors that first saw him in the ER and the paramedics that helped him and anyone else would also at least be in quarantine in their homes, but now I'm finding out that the only people they put in quarantine at home was Duncan's family? They put the ambulance in isolation but not the paramedics that handled him?
It's these idiots that are going to start an outbreak.
kestrel91316
(51,666 posts)uppityperson
(115,677 posts)spreading so much there.
Yes, they should have been quarantined in a clean environment, not left in the infected infectious apartment. But I disagree that "the West African countries are doing a better job of this".
TorchTheWitch
(11,065 posts)The biggest problems in the West African countries is the hospitals themselves are woefully inadequate. They're nothing in the same universe as what us first world countries have. Then there's the huge problem of an extremely poor and unenlightened population. So many of them believe that it's witchcraft, or a hoax by the government to put well people in the hospital where they're being killed or even in the best cases they just don't understand this illness, don't have necessary sanitation or have the same cleanliness values that we have (ex: clothing washed in a basin of creek water and nothing else is considered clean).
What I was talking about is the groups of personnel that have been going around questioning residents, observing for symptoms, and educating the people as best they can despite distrust and resistance. These people live in countries with horribly evil governments with far worse rebel uprisings and have learned to be distrustful of outsiders. They've been recruiting and training locals - educated and intelligent volunteers - to help out because of the distrust and resistance of the population.
When I said that West African countries have been handling this better than we have in using these groups like Doctors Without Borders that have been setting up makeshift hospitals, bringing in necessary equipment, educating hospital workers from doctors to staff who understand the importance of total isolation, not mixing the symptomatic with the non-symptomatic, keeping several feet of physical distance with barriers or without, wearing full head to toe hazmat suits when having to pick up sick people or dead people, and cleaning EVERYTHING with chlorine spray including their own hazmat suits and the entire interior and exterior of vehicles pressed into service as transportation vehicles for symptomatic or dead.
Meanwhile, Dallas authorities have only put the family of Mr. Duncan in home quarantine who were not being watched around the clock (and who tried to leave!) yet are allowing the nurses and doctors who had physical contact with a symptomatic Duncan as well as the paramedics who had physical contact with a vomiting Duncan who (the paramedics) didn't know he had Ebola to go around in public and still serve other emergency patients when they were just as exposed as Duncan was when he became infected by merely carrying the legs of a symptomatic woman back to her home after being refused from the hospitals Ebola ward because of overcrowding. They had unprotected personnel power-wash the pavement where Duncan had vomited before loading for transport and not for days later. They did nothing for days to sanitize the apartment that Duncan was staying in when he became ill and ASSUMED he was only using one bed until they just found out recently that he'd used them all while he was ill.
Compared to the groups of people in Africa in helping to save the victims and control the spread the authorities in Dallas are making such a mess of how it's being handled they're virtually guaranteeing an outbreak. Rather than find out immediately what they needed to do and how they've been woefully bungling everything. Despite hospitals being warned by the CDC how to deal with possibly infected patients, this hospital had a ridiculous computer set up with different protocols for nurses and doctors so that doctors weren't getting vital info from nurses about ANY of their patients though at this late stage they've fixed that glitch that sent Duncan home when he first went in (though he should have told them he'd been exposed to Ebola recently in a hot zone).
The fact that non-symptomatic yet infected people so easily being able to travel and get into the country or any other country is ridiculous. When this virus provides a window of up to 21 days before symptoms occur then of course they have plenty of time to travel to all ends of the earth and infect people in other nations that if not immediately contained will start an outbreak of some size there - or here. Questioning travelers and taking their temperature before leaving a country that is a hot zone is USELESS, and Mr. Duncan's easy ability to get here from one while infected but not yet symptomatic is the perfect example. What if he had never gone to the hospital and never went to be with relatives stayed alone in a cheap motel and died in the room with no one having any clue what he had?
Until the outbreaks are done with in these few West African countries we shouldn't be letting anyone into this country that's coming from a hot zone, and it's easy to trace no matter how many flights they take to get here where they originated from. It would have been a simple thing to track back all the flights Mr. Duncan took in order to find out that he came from Liberia. There's a reason why only an airline from Brussels and one other one are even still doing flights in and out of hot zones and they shouldn't be... and if they hadn't we wouldn't have a possible outbreak here.
All that said, how is it that though these outbreaks have been known and spreading for months has the US been so woefully unprepared and Dallas is STILL mucking it up when the West African countries have brought in groups that know what they're doing and educating the locals?
IIRC, it was you that had posted this Frontline episode about the handling of Ebola in West Africa by one of these groups, and that's what I meant about they're handling it better than we have been with Doctors Without Borders and other groups...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ebola-outbreak/
logosoco
(3,208 posts)I think I have been looking at this through Hollywood eyes. When something like this happens, the experts step in and follow the protocol that has been set up between state and federal agencies.
But, that would cost money.
Wellstone ruled
(34,661 posts)ship'em back to Africa. Yah,right,stupid idiot. Remember all the quarantines in the late 40's and early 50's for Mumps and measles,then came a big Small Pock's out break. Wasn't fun,but we all made it. Then here comes Polio,that one hit big time in our little town. Everyone seemed to make sure every one in their household practiced hygiene to the fullest.