State Sen. Royce West
People who spent time in a Dallas hospital waiting room with an Ebola-infected patient have been assessed for their risk of getting the disease, a top state official testified Tuesday.
They were not ignored, said Health and Human Services Commission chief Kyle Janek, responding to a Dallas lawmaker’s question.
Janek told a Senate panel that all people who were in waiting areas of Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital’s emergency room during Thomas Eric Duncan’s initial visit on Sept. 25, and all paramedics and hospital personnel assisting him on his return to the hospital Sept. 28 were included in “contact tracing.” Such efforts, which rely heavily on interviews, help public health officials decide who could be at risk of infection and needs to be watched.
“Everyone on the ambulance and the providers and the ER patients from that night were all part of the contact list … categorized according to the risk at the time,” Janek said.
Duncan, 42, is the first person diagnosed with Ebola on American soil. In mid-September, he had contact with a friend suffering from the illness in his native Liberia. A few days later, he flew to Dallas. At about 10 p.m. on Sept. 25, a woman drove Duncan to the hospital’s emergency room on Walnut Hill Lane. He had a fever, headache and stomach pain. Although he disclosed being in Africa, hospital personnel sent him home sometime in the morning hours of Sept. 26. Two days later, when he returned by ambulance, he was critically ill. He remains so.
Texas social services czar Kyle Janek
Sen. Royce West, a Dallas Democrat who sits on the chamber’s Health and Human Services Committee, asked Janek if any of the 48 people being monitored by officials were in the waiting room with him.
In cases such as Duncan’s, West said he knows Ebola can’t be transmitted through the air.
He wanted to know, though, if “other patients who shared the waiting room” could be at risk.
“Was there an assessment done at Presbyterian in terms of the number of people that were in the waiting room?” West asked. “And was there any follow up as relates to those individuals in the waiting room?”
About 50 minutes into the hearing, Janek responded that the contact tracing covered everyone West was concerned about. They all were included on the initial contact list, which has been whittled to 48 people who require monitoring, Janek said.
Ten of them are considered at highest risk. None has shown any symptoms.