For Ebola, a positive milestone

The deadly menace that has haunted 48 people since late September will at last be gone as darkness falls Sunday in Dallas.

For them, the threat of Ebola is over.

Four of these people, including a grieving fiancée and her school-aged son, will be able to get up Monday morning, leave the house where they’ve been confined under legal order and try to resume their lives.

It’s an important moment for a nation that, disregarding expert medical pronouncements, remains in something of an Ebola panic. Yes, one man has died here of the disease and two nurses who treated him are now themselves stricken. Yes, tragic errors of care and judgment have been made, not only at the Dallas hospital where Thomas Eric Duncan died Oct. 8 but by public health officials at both the state and federal level.

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Yet, the fact that all of the four dozen individuals remain healthy — despite their direct or indirect contact with Duncan as he fell mortally ill — should reassure Americans, says Joseph McCormick of the University of Texas School of Public Health, who has decades of experience with Ebola and other viral hemorrhagic fevers.

“It illustrates what we’ve been saying, those of us who know the disease, it’s just not that easy to catch,” McCormick said this weekend.

Whether such messages will now overtake the anxiety and even fear is unclear. And even when putting Dallas’s crisis in context, it’s still not time to fully exhale.

Dozens of health care workers and nearly 200 others who may also have been exposed to the Ebola virus continue to be monitored for symptoms. Most of the staffers at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital are at least halfway through the 21 days that represent the disease’s incubation period, but the others, plus relatives and friends of the two nurses to passengers on a commercial airline flight, are not as far along in their countdown.

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At least three different clocks are running based on the different groups’ date of possible contact.

“Every day that goes by, we should feel better,” McCormick noted.

But the internationally known epidemiologist, who has worked in each of the West African countries now being devastated by Ebola, is not about to let the U.S. health care system off the hook. He blasts as “totally unacceptable” the hospital issues in Dallas that led to intensive-care nurses Nina Pham and Amber Vinson being exposed.

“That ratio is outrageous for the number of people who were infected, not for the numbers who weren’t,” McCormick said. “If there were two caregivers infected for every patient who gets treated in West Africa, we wouldn’t have any caregivers left there.”

Just how much the events in Dallas are changing U.S. leaders’ response to the disease at home became more evident on Sunday.

In the morning, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases made the rounds of TV news talk shows and signaled a sharp shift from what had been the oft-stated reassurance by the CDC and Obama administration.

While all U.S. hospitals should be able to identify and isolate a potential case of Ebola, NIAID Director Anthony Fauci said not every hospital can deliver the critical standard of care required.

“I think this idea that every single hospital can take care of a seriously ill Ebola patient right now is just not true,” Fauci said on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he elaborated further, suggesting that there should be a network of hospitals where workers have been extensively trained and drilled to handle a highly infectious disease like Ebola.

There currently are four facilities with highly specialized biocontainment units, but Fauci said, “We need to have more than just the four…so that you don’t come in and then that’s the first time you start thinking about it.”

And just several hours later, the Pentagon announced that the military is establishing a 30-person expeditionary medical support team to assist U.S. health care workers in treating Ebola cases.

The statement said that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, responding to a request from the Department of Health and Human Services, had instructed the chief of U.S. Northern Command to prepare and train “20 critical care nurses, five doctors trained in infectious disease and five trainers in infectious disease protocols.” After receiving up to a week of very specific instruction at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, the team will then be prepared to deploy if ever needed to cities across the country.

In Dallas, meanwhile, Texas Health Presbyterian apologized anew on Sunday. In a letter that appeared in newspapers both there and in Fort Worth, the head of the hospital’s parent system said it would continue its “search for answers” that might help other facilities.

“As an institution, we made mistakes in handling this very difficult challenge,” wrote Barclay Berdan, CEO of Texas Health Resources. He acknowledged that Duncan’s symptoms were misdiagnosed and the hospital not ready to handle the disease. “Although we had begun our Ebola preparedness activities, our training and education programs had not been fully deployed before the virus struck.”...