About 120 people are still being monitored for signs of Ebola in Dallas — the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak in the United States — as dozens of others came out of the three-week observation period Monday, health authorities said.
Dallas officials declared 43 people who may have had contact with the first diagnosed Ebola patient on U.S. soil — Thomas Eric Duncan — free of the deadly virus at a press conference held Monday morning.
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings called the day a “milestone day,” implying that the first group of people possibly exposed to Ebola in the country are cleared of the risk now.
“We are breathing a little easier,” Rawlings said, “but we are still holding our breath a fair amount until Nov. 7.”
The mayor said 120 people on the watch list, 75 of them hospital staffers involved in treating Duncan, will come out of the quarantine period on Nov. 7. The incubation period of Ebola is 21 days at most, and the virus is communicable only after symptoms are shown.
The remaining on the list includes those who had contact with two nurses confirmed to be the only two transmission cases in the country till now.
The two victims, Nina Pham and Amber Joy Vinson, contracted the virus when caring for Duncan. They were moved out of Dallas last week to special isolation units in Bethesda, Maryland and Atlanta, respectively. Both of them are reportedly in fair condition.
Vinson was on a commercial flight from Ohio to Dallas the day before she was diagnosed with Ebola, exposing more than 100 passengers to risk. About 87 of them are being monitored in Ohio, while most of the rest are in Dallas.
Vinson said she got permission from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Dallas authorities before boarding the plane. She was believed to be already showing symptoms before taking the flight.
The incident has brought the CDC and Dallas officials under fire and sparked outcries from the public. Clay Jenkins, the top administrator for Dallas County, apologized for the lapse Monday.
“It was a mistake” for Vinson to have flown “and we apologize,” Jenkins said at the press conference.
The CDC reportedly will soon release an updated safety protocols for health care workers treating Ebola patients. The revised guidance, modeled after a World Health Organization (WHO) guideline, will be more stringent and will set a firmer standard in protecting health care workers, according to officials familiar with the new guidelines.
The guidelines will call for full-body suits and hoods that protect worker’s necks, set rigorous rules for removal of equipment and disinfection of hands, and call for a “site manager” to supervise the putting on and taking off of equipment.
The move came amid protests from health care workers who claim safety protocols for Ebola treatment are insufficient and outdated. The two infected nurses were believed wearing protective suits that did not cover their necks.
The CDC said earlier that a “breach of protocol” led to the infections, but the agency so far has not figured out what went wrong exactly.
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