Nearly three weeks after Thomas Eric Duncan was admitted to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital with Ebola, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings was standing at the hospital’s entrance taping a promotion video for the city’s convention and visitors bureau.
"I want to tell you this – Dallas is open for business like never before," he assured would-be visitors. "Now look, you've got to make some decisions but make them based on fact."
Dallas is safe, he said.
As the city of about 1.3 million people goes about its business, with thousands pouring into the Texas State Fair for its final weekend and fans looking forward to the Dallas Cowboys Sunday football game against the New York Giants, the mayor has his supporters. Ebola is a deadly disease, but the threat of infection for the majority of people is small, residents and visitors said. Still, fears emerge even as they're fast tamped down.
Edward Nash, 40, a cook serving Vietnamese specialties at the Nammi Food Truck parked in downtown Dallas, agreed that the city was ill-prepared for its first Ebola patient. But he thought that since the crisis has unfolded residents have been kept well-informed. Most people never really believed the disease would come to this city – despite the epidemic raging in West Africa, he said. If anywhere, he thought the first case would be recorded in New York City or Los Angeles, a larger metropolis along one of the coasts where more people are entering the country.
"You don’t expect it," he said. "When it happened, it was like, 'Oh, this is not a drill. This is happening for real.' And that's with anything you do, any line of work."
But now that the disease has arrived, he expects health officials to keep it well in hand. Too many things would have to go wrong for a widespread epidemic to take hold as it has in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, he said.
"To happen here in Dallas someone truly has to drop the ball," he said.
Duncan, a Liberian man who traveled to Dallas to see his fiancee, died on Oct. 8. He first went to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital on Sept. 25 — and was sent home despite a fever — then returned in an ambulance three days later and was admitted with Ebola.
Two of the nurses treating him have also been diagnosed with the virus: Nina Pham and Amber Joy Vinson. Both have been transferred to one of the country’s centers specializing in treating contagious diseases, Pham to the National Institutes of Health Clincial Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and Vinson to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.
Before Vinson was diagnosed, she flew to Cleveland, Ohio, to plan her wedding and back to Dallas.
A second hospital worker who may have handled Duncan’s fluid samples also traveled, boarding a cruise on Carnival ship. Mexican authorities turned the ship away in Cozumel and the worker went into voluntary isolation. A helicopter was sent to get a blood sample from her on Saturday. Authorities have stressed she has shown no symptoms.
Health officials have been monitoring 145 people for symptoms of Ebola as a result of direct or indirect contact with Duncan or the nurses. As of Saturday, 14 had completed their surveillance, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Nash was not surprised that the workers had left Dallas. He blames a lack of knowledge about Ebola.
"If they honestly thought that they were a carrier, that they weren’t safe, I believe they wouldn't have traveled," he said. "They wouldn't have put themselves around people. They would have quarantined themselves at the hospital."
Nearby, Faye Hooper was eating ice cream from another of the food trucks at Klyde Warren Park. The 57-year-old geometry teacher from Tennessee was visiting her daughter in Dallas and though Ebola had crossed her mind, she said she did not feel unsafe in Dallas. She had read up on the disease, partly to calm her ninth- and tenth-grade students, and knew that passengers not showing symptoms were not contagious, she said.
"I guess I was concerned about it enough to read about it a little bit," she said.
Dallas had the means to protect people properly, she said. More worrisome would be flying with passengers from West Africa, where countries have not been able to control the spread of the virus, she said.
“That would concern me, but no, not just coming to Dallas,” she said.
Even as other communities have closed schools and quarantined teachers, the Dallas schools have remained open. Five students who had contact with Duncan were quarantined quickly. Based on information from the Dallas County Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the district determined there was no need to close any schools, said Andre Riley, the director of news and information for the Dallas Independent School District.
The day after Duncan's diagnosis became public there was about a 10 percent drop-off at the schools the five students' schools, he said. Attendance was back to normal by the beginning of the following week.
"It's a great thing that folks are being monitored," he said. "It shows that there's a heightened level of awareness and our community is taking this seriously."
Two musicians in downtown Dallas, Adontis Barber, 25, and 24-year-old Che Sealy, said journalists were exaggerating the danger.
“They’re blowing it way out of proportion without dispensing the proper knowledge of it,” Barber said. “Why do you have to push it so hard, so fast, so quick all the time?”
Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital will have to work hard to repair its reputation after turning Duncan away, he said. Now people are asking whether that occurred because he was a black man, he said.
“That’s the question that’s been itching on everyone’s ears,” he said.
The hospital has denied discriminating against Duncan because of his nationality or lack of health care, and it has undertaken a public relations campaign to restore the city's confidence in the care it provides. It has begun a social media effort using the hashtag #presbyproud, and as the weekend started, nurses and others held a brief rally in support of the hospital. Barclay Berdan, the CEO of the hospital's parent company, Texas Health Resources, has written an open letter to the community acknowledging mistakes and the hospital's lack of preparation an describing changes.
"We have acted aggressively to improve our response and protect the health and safety of our workers and community," the letter reads.
Nonetheless there are signs the city is on edge. Dr. Daniel Varga, the chief clinical officer for Texas Health Resources, acknowledged to The Dallas Morning News that some patients have cancelled appointments. Then on Saturday, a woman fell ill on a Dallas DART train and a station was closed for a time.
At the State Fair, where cowboy burritos were on sale this year and steers and lambs and goats were on display, some among the throngs admitted to being worried.
Alana Etheridge, a Dallas resident who works on health-care contracts, said she had given some thought to whether she should attend.
"Should we go, should we not go?" she said.
"Basically you can't be afraid," she said. "I think the best thing is just to be knowledgeable and educate yourself on how it's actually spread. But we have to go to work and we have to go to other public places."
Brenda Willis, there with her husband and two children, said she thought that Dallas had done its best.
"The best they can with what they have, yes," said Willis, 39, an Austin resident works in pharmaceutical research. "Are they equipped with what they need? No."
Few hospitals in the United States are outfitted to treat Ebola successfully, she said.
Taking a break in the shade, Jacque and Kayla Talley, Arlington residents and mother and daughter who work with mental-health counselors, said they were not afraid.
Kayla Talley, 19, said she did not think officials were handling the Ebola scare as well as they could.
"People worry about it because now it's here," she said. "It's affecting us."
Her mother praised the nurses who took care of Duncan, even at their own risk. She refused to stay away from the State Fair, just as she hadn't stayed away after the September 11th terrorist attacks when people were warned against mingling in large crowds, she said.
"I wasn't going to let someone ruin our family tradition," she said. "So no, it doesn't scare me."
Photo Credit: AP
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