The Wall Street Journal – October 21, 2014
by Melanie Grayce West
New York City officials are stepping up training and outreach this week to thousands of city employees and emergency workers who would be among those involved, even if only peripherally, in the response to any Ebola cases. Officials met Monday with representatives of the city’s 350,000 municipal workers and vowed to beef up safety protocols and education on how the disease is spread.
During the hour-plus question-and-answer session, they stressed repeatedly that it is virtually impossible to catch Ebola by touching a doorknob or hauling a bag of household trash.
“We need to work to ensure that everybody, down to the crossing guard, is aware of these facts,” said New York City Health Commissioner Mary Bassett.
Meanwhile, in remarks Monday, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo stressed that the city and state are prepared for any Ebola cases and are working with federal officials.
“There’s a keen sense in Washington of the ways that we can work together,” said Mr. de Blasio.
“I feel good about where we are with our health-care systems,” said Mr. Cuomo, “and we’re doing training across the board.”
The governor added that New York is trying to get all hospitals statewide ready and prepared for Ebola patients.
City agencies and hospitals have been preparing for months as the Ebola epidemic has grown in West Africa and as two Dallas health-care workers contracted the disease this month from a Liberian man who traveled to the U.S. and died on Oct. 8. As of last week, 4,555 people have died of Ebola across seven countries, including the U.S., according to the World Health Organization.
In New York City, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has received calls from health providers reporting about 155 patients who had Ebola-like symptoms, officials said.
Of those, 136 patients had neither been in an affected area nor had exposure to an Ebola patient during the 21 days before their symptoms emerged. The remaining 19 patients had no high- or low-risk exposure factors. And a dozen from that group received an alternative diagnosis—everything from malaria to pregnancy to an upper-respiratory infection, according to a department spokeswoman.
Private and public hospitals have been responding to the risk, conducting secret drills that send fake patients into area emergency rooms to test health-care workers on infection-control best practices.
City agencies, too, have new protocols to help identify and isolate suspected infections outside hospitals. The fire department has developed procedures, trying to have hazardous-material technicians respond to certain cases instead of regular emergency-medical technicians, said Joseph Esposito, head of the city’s office of Emergency Management. “We’re addressing it at all levels,” he said.
Citywide, there is a daily conference call among agencies to coordinate response and reinforce aspects of incident command, according to officials from the Greater New York Hospital Association, a trade group representing nearly 300 private hospitals. The city also has held at least one so-called “tabletop” exercise to test the preparation and coordination of various city, state and federal agencies, said the same officials.
“There is a total and complete commitment across all lines of government to coordinate with us and all the other entities that are basically the first line of defense,” said Kenneth E. Raske, the association’s president.
That coordination will be seen again Tuesday when nurses and other health-care workers are to be trained at the Jacob Javits Convention Center by infection-control specialists in the use and removal of protective gear used in the treatment of Ebola patients. The event, a joint program of the Greater New York Hospital Association and the 1199 SEIU health-care workers’ union, will attract hospital administrators and thousands of workers.
—Andrew Tangel, Sonja Sharp and Colleen Wilson contributed to this article.
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