After days of escalating fears about the spread of Ebola, Americans could only watch and wait through the weekend as potential victims endured the monitoring period for signs of infection.
There have been no new infections since the third patient was diagnosed Wednesday. And in North Texas, 14 people who came in contact with the nation’s first Ebola patient cleared the three-week observation period necessary to ensure they are not ill, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Saturday.
Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said “this is a critical weekend” because the 48 people who came in contact with Thomas Eric Duncan before he was hospitalized could be declared clear of the disease.
“If we don’t see new patients this weekend, then we will see the remainder of those 48 we were tasked with following come off the list,” Jenkins said.
Among those on the brink of safety are Duncan’s fiancee and three of her relatives. They will remain under quarantine until midnight Sunday.
Jenkins said the county is still bracing for the possibility of more people getting sick, with plans for about 50 medical specialists from Parkland Memorial Hospital to respond if there’s another case.
But with the hope that the risk is passing, Dallas officials were looking ahead.
Mayor Mike Rawlings said Saturday that he’d had a conference call with 80 pastors to discuss the need to welcome people cleared after the monitoring period. He said he’d had similar calls with business and apartment building owners.
“We need you to ask your congregation to confront their fear with facts,” he told the religious leaders.
In all, 159 people in the Dallas area have been monitored because of their possible exposure to Ebola through Duncan or the other two patients, his nurses Nina Pham and Amber Vinson.
But health alerts from those three cases have spread far beyond North Texas.
In Ohio, where Vinson visited relatives while in the early stages of the disease, officials said Saturday that 116 people are facing scrutiny because of their potential exposure to Ebola.
The state’s epidemiologist said some are being required to meet with physicians daily, while others have been asked to monitor their temperatures and have daily phone contact with medical professionals. Only Vinson’s stepfather has been quarantined.
Eighty-seven of the people in Ohio who are being monitored flew with Vinson last weekend on Frontier Airlines. That company has urged up to 800 passengers to contact the CDC, but most of them were not on flights with the ill nurse. Many of them were on the plane later, before it was taken out of service to be cleaned.
The airline’s president said Friday that the CDC had determined that Vinson may have been in a more advanced state of the illness than originally believed, but he said the risk of infection remained very low.
Reinforcing officials’ assurances that the danger of widespread contamination is slight, President Barack Obama urged Americans to keep Dallas’ Ebola cases in perspective.
“What we’re seeing now is not an outbreak or an epidemic of Ebola in America,” he said Saturday in his weekly radio address. “We’re a nation of more than 300 million people. To date, we’ve seen three cases of Ebola diagnosed here.”
The president pointed out that in contrast, thousands of Americans die from the flu every year.
The CDC has said it will soon release new guidelines for health-care workers dealing with Ebola to help prevent the kind of infections that transmitted the disease from Duncan to Vinson and Pham.
Those infections have prompted fears of other Dallas health-care workers, including a laboratory supervisor who remains isolated in a cruise ship cabin in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.
That woman’s weeklong cruise began before either of her fellow workers’ illnesses were diagnosed, and she has not shown any signs of the disease.
However, she remains under watch because she may have been in contact with Duncan’s lab specimens. After being refused port access Friday in Mexico, she is headed for Galveston.
Although health experts have largely dismissed the dangers posed by most of the people who are being monitored, fears continue to spread at even the slightest hint of risk.
On Saturday in Dallas, a brief panic erupted after a woman spit on the DART White Rock light-rail platform.
Rumors quickly spread as a TV station tweeted that a person on an Ebola watch list had vomited, prompting DART to close the station for about three hours.
Eventually county officials sorted out the situation: The woman had visited the Ivy Apartments, where the area’s first Ebola victim had lived.
Although she is not considered at risk for the disease, she was taken to a hospital to be evaluated just in case.
“We’ve got to tone it down to where we’re reporting on facts and not rumors,” Dallas County Health Director Zachary Thompson said. “There’s enough panic already.”
The Associated Press and Tribune News Service contributed to this report.
