Ebola: Keep Calm, Carry On
On the subway lines and in the streets traveled by a doctor infected with Ebola, New Yorkers voiced some concern, but mostly went about their normal routines.
Video by Stephen Farrell and Natalia V. Osipova on Publish Date October 24, 2014.Less than 24 hours after the first diagnosis of Ebola in New York City, worries about a public panic were already giving way to a desire to restore order as quickly as possible.
While city officials were doing their best, through words and deeds, to allay fears, health officials and cleaning crews were rushing to reopen the businesses that Dr. Craig Spencer had patronized since his return last week from treating Ebola patients in Guinea. At the apartment building in Harlem where he lives with his fiancée, workers in protective suits removed personal items and placed them in big, blue barrels set on a gray tarpaulin in the hallway.
City Councilman Mark Levine, who represents that part of Harlem, said that the crew was trying to make the apartment habitable by Friday night. He said a contractor hired by the city was sanitizing the rooms and disposing of sheets, towels and toothbrushes as if they were medical waste.
“It’s a pretty involved process,” Mr. Levine said in an interview. “Speaking optimistically, when Dr. Spencer gets better and/or if his fiancée chooses to come home, the goal would be that the apartment would be ready for someone to live in as soon as tonight.”
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Video by Associated Press on Publish Date October 24, 2014. Photo by Josh Haner/The New York Times.A neighbor who lives across the hall from the couple, Ricqui Lawrence, 54, said the cleanup crew had told residents it was safe to stay in the building. But Mr. Lawrence said he had taken some precautions of his own: He cleaned the floor in the hallway with bleach, as well as the elevator buttons, Dr. Spencer’s doorknob and his own doorknob.
“Beyond that,” Mr. Lawrence said, “I’m not going to freak out about it. I was a germaphobe, so I’m still a germaphobe. That’s not going to change.”
But he added that at least one of his neighbors on the fifth floor had temporarily moved out of the building. “She has two small children,” Mr. Lawrence said. “That’s reasonable.”
On Friday evening, Dr. Spencer remained in isolation on the seventh floor at Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan. His fiancée, Morgan Dixon, and two of their friends were under quarantine, city health officials said.
The governors of New York and New Jersey announced on Friday afternoon that anybody who had had direct contact with Ebola patients in West Africa would be quarantined upon arrival at Kennedy or Newark Liberty International Airports.
But most New Yorkers were sticking to their routines and looking forward to the weekend — even at places Dr. Spencer had visited before he fell ill. Health officials said Dr. Spencer traveled by subway to the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan on Tuesday and walked on the High Line elevated park. On Wednesday, they said, he went to the Gutter, a bowling alley in Brooklyn.
At the Blue Bottle Coffee stand on the High Line, where Dr. Spencer stopped on Tuesday, several people were queued up for coffees. An employee, who declined to identify himself, would say only, “We’re all fine here.”
At the Meatball Shop in Greenwich Village, where officials said Dr. Spencer ate on Tuesday, a sign on the door announced that the restaurant was closed for lunch. David Brand, 27, a social work student at New York University, said he could “see the headlines writing themselves already,” given the spherical theme of the bowling alley and the meatball shop and the phonetic likeness of bowling and balls to Ebola.
“It’s too bad for those businesses that it’s become a circus,” he said. “People don’t have information, and that just exacerbates the problem and” — he pointed to the pack of reporters and cameras outside the Meatball Shop — “that doesn’t help.”
A spokesman for the restaurant said that the health department had assured the owners that Dr. Spencer’s visit posed no health risk, but just to be safe, it closed voluntarily “while it was cleaned and sanitized.” The Meatball Shop intended to reopen for business on Friday night.
Across the East River, the Gutter also had closed upon learning that Dr. Spencer had been there shortly before getting sick. Around midday Friday, a doctor from the city’s health department, Don Weiss, stood with the Gutter’s owner, Todd Powers, in front of the bowling alley’s entrance to declare that “there is no risk of Ebola here.”
“We came to see that there was no exposure — meaning there was no bodily fluids that were here. We confirmed that,” Dr. Weiss said.
Mr. Powers said he would have the Gutter thoroughly cleaned and sanitized. “Once that’s taken care of, we’ll open the doors to the public and we hope the mayor and governor come down and bowl,” he said. He did not specify when the Gutter would reopen.