NEW YORK—Things are quieting down from the media frenzy of last Thursday, when the city saw its first case of Ebola and New Yorkers feared catching the deadly disease.
Fear rose when news of a 5-year-old boy returned from Guinea—one of the three Ebola ravaged West African countries—developed a fever, but tests for the Ebola virus showed Monday that the boy only had a respiratory illness.
Those in the Bronx, where the boy lives, cheered when they heard the news.
Dr. Craig Spencer, of Washington Heights, is still in “serious but stable condition” at Bellevue Hospital Center. His fiancée and two friends remain under quarantine.
The nurse under mandatory quarantine in a Newark hospital was released Monday after being symptom-free for 24 hours. She had threatened to sue for the “inhumane” treatment she was subjected to, but agreed to voluntary quarantine in her Maine home where she was transported by private car.
And in Dallas, a second nurse has been released from the hospital, cured of Ebola.
Mayor Bill de Blasio attributed the success of New York’s combating the disease to the months of preparation the city had undergone, at a press conference Tuesday outside FDNY EMS Station 10 in upper Manhattan.
“Folks swung into action for something previously unknown to our city,” he said.
He revealed that the Dallas mayor had phoned him when news surfaced of Spencer quarantining himself in his apartment. The Dallas mayor wanted to share lessons he learned from mistakes made in Texas’s first Ebola victim Thomas Duncan’s case, de Blasio said.
New York and New Jersey mandates quarantines at home for those who don’t show symptoms and have had contact with Ebola patients in West Africa, which is a step further than the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines go and more than what most other states’ policies demand.
Those flying in from the affected West African countries are still being monitored and screened, regardless of whether they have symptoms, de Blasio confirmed, as New York’s cautious policy toward the virus continues.
