It will take a while before calm washes over Dallas, the first American city stricken with the Ebola virus.
Emotions are still running high, especially at the northeast Dallas apartment complex where the frightened family that hosted Thomas Eric Duncan is isolated.
Folks are scared and uneasy and unsure what lies ahead. It’s an unnerving waiting game for all.
Duncan, perhaps unwittingly, has exposed those closest to him in America to a deadly disease that has claimed 3,300-plus lives in West Africa. Even if he lives, I don’t know how he can live with himself.
Duncan, however, may well have entertained that question before he got on a plane in Liberia bound for America. He might have asked, “Do I want to lie and live — or do I want to be an honest dead man?”
All we know is that he allegedly lied on an airport departure screening questionnaire about whether he’d had contact with a person infected with the virus. He said he hadn’t. But just days before he got on a plane, Duncan reportedly helped load a pregnant woman into a taxi and rode with her to a hospital. She was infected with the virus and died hours later.
It’s still not clear whether he was aware the woman had Ebola, but Liberian authorities said he would be prosecuted when he returns to his homeland. And Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins said he’s considering possible criminal charges, too.
The troubles Duncan brought with him are multiplying.
On Thursday, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, where Duncan turned up six days after arriving in Dallas, implied that a problem with its electronic records led to poor communication about his travel history.
But late Friday the hospital said that wasn’t the case. Duncan’s travel history was documented and available to his doctors and nurses, the hospital said.
The new statement raises even more questions about what might have gone wrong at Texas Health Presbyterian.
Confusion and contradictions can’t happen if we — as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Tom Frieden vowed Tuesday — are going to stop this virus in its tracks.
Duncan was given antibiotics and sent back to the crowded apartment. Two days later, he returned in an ambulance.
It was one of several glitches on the home front, ground zero in America’s first stance against the virus. Since then, despite the “abundance of caution” that local health experts say they’re exercising, more questionable moves were made — such as initially leaving the family unguarded in the apartment.
The family didn’t heed instructions to stay put. So they ventured out, potentially exposing others to the virus if they’ve contracted it.
There was another hard-to-overlook mistake, one that left a lot of people scratching their heads. Days after the ambulance carried Duncan from the Ivy Apartments, the infected apartment still had not been cleansed.
Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said he visited Thursday night with the four people Duncan was staying with to personally apologize for that oversight.
“I want to see them treated as I would want my own family treated,” Jenkins said during a news conference Friday.
There’ve been other miscues, too. Five Dallas ISD students, for instance, had come in contact with Duncan or his relatives. They were examined Tuesday and told to stay home from school until the 21-day incubation period for the virus elapses.
But the next day, a boy who lives in the Ivy Apartments returned to school. He was sent to the nurse’s office and then sent back home.
What does all of this mean?
It means that, despite the best of intentions, plenty of egregious errors have been made in Dallas. Some experts say the mistakes being made here reveal potentially dangerous cracks in one of the best public health systems in the world.
“I think we’ve learned a hard lesson,” said Tony Goldberg, associate director for research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Global Health Institute.
“The U.S. is clearly one of the best countries in the world, if not the best in the world, for curing people and keeping them alive when they’re sick,” Goldberg said. “But this has indicated a real gap in our public health response system.”
That gap, he said, is caused by conflicting protocols, a lack of training, too many cooks in the kitchen during a crisis and stress, among other things.
“The Achilles heel is human error,” he said. “That to me is the big lesson — a public health system is only as good as the preparedness of the people in them.”
James Ragland writes on race and culture, education, social services and public health. Follow him at facebook.com/jamesragland61.
