New York Ebola patient Dr. Craig Spencer “continues to be stable” at the hospital where he is in isolation, Dr. Mary Bassett, the city health commissioner, told reporters Friday afternoon. He is “in good enough shape to be in conversation with everyone around him,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio added.
A Doctors Without Borders physician who recently returned to New York from West Africa has become the first Ebola case in the city and the fourth diagnosed in the United States, authorities said.
The doctor, identified as Craig Spencer, 33, came back from treating Ebola patients in Guinea on October 17 and developed a fever, nausea, pain and fatigue Thursday. He is isolated in stable condition at New York’s Bellevue Hospital Center, one of the eight hospitals statewide that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo designated this month as part of an Ebola preparedness plan.
Spencer, who is in intensive care, went for a jog, may have gone to a restaurant, traveled the city’s subway system and went bowling before feeling ill, but authorities sought to assure an anxious public that the likelihood of him spreading the virus was low.
The transit system is safe, Cuomo told CNN, vowing to ride the subway Friday.
“We want to state at the outset there is no reason for New Yorkers to be alarmed,” Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters late Thursday.
The U.S. Air Force, at the request of the White House, late Thursday flew a three-person team from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to New York before transporting a medical sample from the city to the CDC in Atlanta.
The CDC will do additional testing to confirm the doctor’s initial positive test result.
Health officials said three people who had been in contact with Spencer — his fiancee and two friends — were healthy but would be quarantined and monitored. The fiancee is under quarantine at Bellevue, a source with knowledge of the situation told CNN. A fourth person, a car service driver, had no physical contact with the patient and was not considered at risk.
Dr. Mary Travis Bassett, New York City’s health commissioner, said Spencer completed his work in Guinea on October 12 and left Africa two days later via Europe. He arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport on October 17. Bassett said he exhibited no symptoms during his journey or any time afterward until Thursday morning. He had been checking his temperature twice a day.
Spencer went for a 3-mile jog and visited a bowling alley in Brooklyn named the Gutter before he felt symptoms Thursday morning, Bassett said. The bowling alley has been closed. He also traveled on three subway lines. Authorities are checking his MetroCard to determine where else he went.
“At the time that the doctor was on the subway, he did not have fever … he was not symptomatic,” Bassett said, adding that the chances of anyone contracting the virus from contact with Spencer were “close to nil.”
Spencer took a trip to Brooklyn Wednesday night to go bowling at the popular bar and alley known as The Gutter before he became ill, health department investigators said.
New York officials reassure the public
De Blasio and Bassett were joined by Cuomo at a news conference to allay concerns about the spread of the virus.
“We are as ready as one could be for this circumstance,” Cuomo said, adding that the situation in his state is different from what happened in Texas, where a man from Liberia was diagnosed with Ebola and two health care workers who treated him later contracted the virus.
“We had the advantage of learning from the Dallas experience,” Cuomo said.
De Blasio added, “Ebola is very difficult to contract. Being on the same subway car or living near someone with Ebola does not put anyone at risk.”
The physician, employed at New York’s Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, has been in isolation at Bellevue since emergency personnel took him there Thursday morning.
His Manhattan apartment has been isolated.
Earlier Thursday, de Blasio — without naming the doctor being treated — said that “careful protocols were followed every step of the way” in the city’s handling of the case. The hospitalized doctor has “worked closely” with health officials, the mayor said.
The doctor exhibited symptoms of the Ebola virus for “a very brief period of time” and had direct contact with “very few people” in New York, de Blasio told reporters.
On his Facebook page, Spencer posted a photo of himself in protective gear. The page indicates that he went to Guinea around September 18 and later to Brussels, Belgium, in mid-October.
“Off to Guinea with Doctors Without Borders (MSF)” he wrote. “Please support organizations that are sending support or personnel to West Africa, and help combat one of the worst public health and humanitarian disasters in recent history.”
In a statement, Columbia Presbyterian Hospital said the doctor was “a dedicated humanitarian” who went to “an area of medical crisis to help a desperately underserved population.”
“He is a committed and responsible physician who always puts his patients first,” the hospital statement said. “He has not been to work at our hospital and has not seen any patients at our hospital since his return from overseas.”
The doctor was monitoring his health
In a statement Thursday, Doctors Without Borders confirmed that the physician recently returned from West Africa and was “engaged in regular health monitoring.” The doctor contacted Doctors Without Borders on Thursday to report a fever, the statement said.
The doctor began feeling sluggish a couple of days ago, but it wasn’t until Thursday when he developed fever of 100.3 degrees Fahrenheit (about 38 Celsius) that he contacted Doctors Without Borders, authorities said.
The case came to light after the New York Fire Department received a call shortly before noon Thursday about a sick person in Manhattan. The patient was taken to Bellevue.
Mark Levine, a city councilman who represents the doctor’s Manhattan neighborhood, said earlier Thursday, before news broke of the doctor’s positive test, that city health department workers were canvassing the area, distributing information on the disease door-to-door, according to CNN affiliate WABC-TV.
“The goal right now is to make sure people don’t panic,” he said.
The health department said a special ambulance unit transported a patient suffering from a fever and gastrointestinal symptoms.
Bellevue is designated for the “isolation, identification and treatment of potential Ebola patients” in the city, the statement said.
“As a further precaution, beginning today (Thursday), the Health Department’s team of disease detectives immediately began to actively trace all of the patient’s contacts to identify anyone who may be at potential risk,” the health department statement said.
“The chances of the average New Yorker contracting Ebola are extremely slim,” the statement said, adding that the disease is spread by direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person.
U.S. considers Ebola quarantine
The United States is considering a mandatory quarantine for returning health care workers from West Africa, an Obama administration official said Friday.
The move is an attempt to give clarity to a public concerned about travelers returning from the region and is not because officials fear there is a risk of transmission from people who are not exhibiting Ebola-like symptoms, the official said.
Ebola has killed nearly 5,000 people, mostly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. But fears about its spread has mounted since the first person diagnosed with the disease in the United States was hospitalized in Texas last month.
Thomas Eric Duncan, who had flown from Liberia to Dallas, died on October 8. Two nurses who treated him became infected with the virus and underwent treatment, with the cases raising questions about the ability of local and federal officials to deal with an outbreak in the United States.
On Friday, the National Institutes of Health said one of the nurses, Nina Pham, had been declared free of the Ebola virus.
Pham appeared at a NIH news conference in Maryland, where she thanked Dr. Kent Brantly, the American physician who also survived Ebola, for donating his plasma to her while she was sick. She also thanked God, her family, friends and the medical professionals who treated her.
“I feel fortunate and blessed to be standing here today,” she told reporters.
The other nurse, Amber Vinson, who is getting treatment for Ebola at Atlanta’s Emory University Hospital, is steadily regaining her strength, and her spirits are high, her family said. Doctors can no longer detect the virus in her body, and she’ll be transferred from isolation, her mother said.
Already, all travelers coming to the United States from Ebola-affected areas will be actively monitored for 21 days, starting Monday.
In addition, all U.S.-bound passengers from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea must land in one of the five U.S. airports with enhanced screening for Ebola: New York’s Kennedy, Washington Dulles, New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International, Chicago’s O’Hare International and Hartsfield-Jackson International in Atlanta.
Spencer also went for a 3-mile jog, visited the New York City High Line and a bowling alley in Brooklyn on Wednesday evening before feeling symptomatic, according to Bassett.
