New York City’s health department runs a 24-hour-a-day operation that defends against Ebola; its efforts include tracking more than 300 people for symptoms of the disease.
Anemona Hartocollis, a Metro health reporter, wrote about this effort, the largest in the country, in an article in The Times on Wednesday.
Here she chronicles her visit inside the nerve center of the city’s monitoring operation.
We’ve all heard the political debate over quarantine for Ebola patients.
Meanwhile, New York City has been monitoring as many as 357 people, mostly travelers returning from West Africa, for symptoms of the disease.
The number alone made it a massive operation, and my editor asked for an inside look.
So began several days of negotiations for access with the New York City health department. Dr. Craig Spencer, the first and only Ebola patient in New York, was still in the hospital (he got out Tuesday), and the health department was understandably worried that something could go wrong, and I would be “inside” in a position to pick up on it.
A sympathetic health department press officer, Megan Montalvo, explained that the department’s lawyers were sweating out the details of how much access I could have, because of concerns about, among other things, privacy regulations under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or Hipaa.
Eventually, I received a somewhat lawyerly written document approving my visit to the inner sanctum of the monitoring operation, but only under certain conditions: no video; no photography in the room where the monitors worked; no publishing the names of those being monitored.
The big fear was that a videographer or photographer would capture the names of or other identifying information about the people being monitored for Ebola. I pushed back a little, arguing that the story would not make sense if a photographer was not allowed into the monitoring call center, and the lawyers eventually capitulated on that point.
The ensuing inside look turned out to be fascinating, with much material that fell, regrettably, to the cutting room floor, as I focused on the monitoring effort alone.
The photographer, Joshua Bright, and I attended one of the health department’s twice-daily, seven-days-a-week Ebola command meetings. Just walking into the room made me feel like I was in a movie about NASA.
Nine video screens lined the walls, and for some reason, many of them were tuned to images of blue sky and clouds. Health department chiefs sat around tables arranged in a long rectangle, their rather clunky-looking ThinkPads in front of them. A piece of plain white paper with the title of the department – Surveillance, Quarantine and Monitoring, for instance – was taped to the back of each laptop to identify the person sitting in front of it.
I have to admit that, as a taxpayer, I was secretly pleased the laptops were not more glamorous. (My Times-issued laptop is a battered ThinkPad, and it is not easy to carry around.)
Dr. Jay Varma, deputy commissioner for disease control and the “incident commander” for Ebola in New York, ran the meeting at warp speed, and much of it was in health department code, so I was glad the lawyers had permitted audio taping.
My favorite exchange never made it into the article.
Dr. Varma announced that his 10th-grade daughter had come home talking about an Ebola lesson she received in school. Sounding like the sleep-deprived, clueless parent of a teenager who does not share any more than necessary, he asked his colleagues: Were the schools giving mandatory Ebola training?
“Jay, did she come home wearing P.P.E.?” Dr. Don Weiss, the head of surveillance, piped up, using the now-ubiquitous initials for personal protective equipment.
“No, that’s standard in my house,” Dr. Varma shot back.
As it happens, and as I learned at that moment, there is no mandatory Ebola training in the schools – yet.