For days, Mayor Mike Rawlings preached calm amid an Ebola scare, saying there were “zero symptoms” among others in contact with a Liberian visitor diagnosed with the deadly disease.
That task became more challenging after midnight Sunday when he and Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins learned of a second case, a nurse who had treated that man at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas.
“It’s disappointing, but not totally a surprise,” said Rawlings, who described himself as a “glass-half-empty sort of guy.”
Rawlings split his time Sunday at the local emergency operations center, the hospital and the neighborhood where the new Ebola patient lives.
In an interview, he said he’s tried to strike a balance between reassuring the public and acknowledging that the city was moving quickly to handle the latest development.
At the 7:30 a.m. news conference at Presbyterian — which he acknowledged was serious, even grim — the goal was simple, he said: Give the public “as much information as possible.”
Although he had expressed optimism late last week, he said Sunday that he “never felt we were out of the woods.”
He told staffers Friday they might be able to relax if there were no new cases by the end of the next week. That’s when the monitoring period ends for those who had been in close contact with the first patient.
Now, after working through the night, he said the immediate next steps included decontaminating the health worker’s home, moving her car from the hospital’s parking lot and, notably, taking care of her dog.
