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Ebola
turns Dallas hospital into a ‘Ghost Town’ – virus could destroy
U.S. healthcare system
October
2014 – DALLAS –
The Dallas nurses who contracted Ebola while treating a patient at
Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital have been moved from the building,
but patients are still steering clear of the once-bustling hospital.
People have called to cancel outpatient procedures, and some have
even opted not to go to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in
emergency situations, ABC Dallas affiliate WFAA reports. “It feels
like a ghost town,” Rachelle Cohorn, a local health care vendor who
has been to the hospital recently, told WFAA. “No one is even
walking around the hospital.” Texas Health Presbyterian’s average
emergency room wait time had been 52 minutes, according to federal
hospital data.
But when ABC News called the hospital and asked the
emergency department for the ER wait time today, the response was
that there was no wait time. The hospital has also taken public
relations hits on a number of fronts. It was revealed that Ebola
patient Thomas Eric Duncan was initially sent home from the ER even
though he told staff there that he had recently come from West
Africa, the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak. And this week, another
health care worker who took care Duncan criticized the hospital
administration for not providing proper training and equipment to
nurses caring for Duncan. The hospital still has no idea how two of
its staff nurses were infected with the Ebola virus.
To
weather the storm, the hospital will need to convince people that
Texas Health Presbyterian is still a safe hospital, said Dr. Dan
Varga, the chief clinical officer of Texas Health Resources, which
owns the Dallas hospital. “I would tell this community that
Presbyterian is an absolutely safe hospital to come to,” Varga told
ABC News chief health and medical editor Dr. Richard Besser on
Thursday.
“We’ve
been in communication with our doctors that have their private
offices in our professional buildings around the campus who are
getting 40, 50, 60 percent cancellations just for fear of being
somewhere in the geography of the hospital where Ebola is treated.”
Texas Health Presbyterian became the first hospital in the nation to
be faced with diagnosing Ebola on American soil when Duncan, a
Liberian man visiting family in Dallas, went to the emergency room on
Sept. 26. He was initially sent home with antibiotics, but returned
two days later in an ambulance when his symptoms worsened. The
hospital put Duncan in isolation. He died on Oct. 8. Two nurses
contracted Ebola from Duncan, though how exactly they were exposed
remains unknown. Nina Pham, 26, was diagnosed on Oct. 11, and Amber
Vinson, 29, was diagnosed on Oct. 15, health officials said.
Texas
Health Presbyterian cared for Pham in isolation for five days before
requesting that she be moved to another facility. She was flown to an
NIH facility in Bethesda, Maryland, on Oct. 16, and Vinson was flown
to Emory University Hospital the day before. Varga told Congress on
Oct. 16 that the hospital staff was never trained to handle a patient
with Ebola. He said they received guidelines from the U.S. Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention in July but never received any
face-to-face training. About 70 staff members are being monitored
after possible exposure to the Ebola virus. “Over the long haul is
the emotional toll going to be something that leaves a mark?” Varga
asked. “We have a bunch of employees on surveillance now because
they had contact with Mr. Duncan, with Nina, with Amber.” Alex
Normington, who works for a national firm that helps hospitals
establish their reputations, told WFAA that Texas Health Presbyterian
has had a “very good” reputation since it opened in 1966. “A
hospital’s reputation can take years or generations to build,”
Normington said. –ABC
News
Healthcare
system in grave peril: Decontamination
protocols, the disposal of hazardous waste from the patient, unpaid
medical bills, the infection of healthcare workers, potential
lawsuits and on-going civil litigation exposure. This is how a
level-4 pathogen like Ebola could destroy well-established U.S.
hospitals across the country in the space of a few weeks. U.S.
hospitals were never designed to treat such cases and U.S. healthcare
professionals have no training in how to treat patients infected
with level-4 pathogens. Duncan was only one case.
There will be many more. It may take years for this Dallas hospital
to recover from this one Ebola case – if it ever recovers at all.
–Alvin Conway
Liberia thinks it needs 84,000 more body bags for the Ebola outbreak – cases likely 2.5 times higher than reported
October
2014 – LIBERIA - Earlier
today, the Liberian government published a list of the supplies it
has on hand to treat Ebola patients — and the supplies it thinks it
will need.
The data paints a dire picture of a country bracing for an
outbreak that only gets worse. The Liberian government estimates it
needs an additional 84,841 body bags. It currently has 4,901 on hand.
The West African country also needs more than 2 million boxes of
rubber gloves and a half-million pairs of goggles and tens of
thousands more pairs of rubber boot.
Right now, it has very little
of any of these. Liberia has been harder hit by the Ebola outbreak
than any other country. It has so far recorded 4,076 cases and 2,316
deaths. More than half of all Ebola deaths worldwide have happened in
Liberia. The country is also poor, with few resources to fight the
deadly outbreak. Even before Ebola hit, Liberia had one of the
world’s poorest health care systems. Liberia spends an average of
$66 per person per year on health care — a mere 2 percent of the
OECD average.
Supplies matter a lot in the Ebola outbreak. Without
proper protective gear, it’s easier for the disease to spread —
not just in Liberia, but also outside of the country, too. If you’re
looking for ways to help ease the supply shortage, consider this list
of non-profits currently providing aid in West Africa in the Ebola
fight.
We
have no idea how bad the Ebola outbreak actually is
While
official estimates suggest there are already more than 8,000 cases of
Ebola this year, the real number is likely much, much higher.
“Under-reporting” has been a constant feature of the world’s
worst Ebola epidemic. Cases have gone missing, deaths are uncounted,
and “there is widespread under-reporting of new cases,”
warns the
World Health Organization.
The WHO has continually said that even its
current dire numbers don’t reflect the full reality. The
estimated 8,000-plus Ebola cases in West Africa could just be the tip
of the iceberg.
To
get to this point, Dr. David Fisman, an infectious disease modeler
working on Ebola, summed up: “A person needs to have recognized
symptoms, seek care, be correctly diagnosed, get lab testing — if
they’re going to be a confirmed case — have the clerical and
bureaucratic apparatus actually transmit that information to the
people doing гsurveillance.
At each step along the way the case can
fall out of the pool of ‘counteds.” There’s no way to know how
vastly under-reported this epidemic is, but there are estimates being
floated around. Comparing surveillance figures with actual hospital
beds dedicated to Ebola care in West Africa, the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention suggested that under-reporting could be
happening at a rate of 2.5.
This means that every one case reported
equals 2.5 on
the
ground. If true, today’s 8,000 Ebola cases could actually look more
like 20,000. –Vox
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