Specialist medical teams were decontaminating the New York apartment of a doctor confirmed to have Ebola on Friday, as the city’s top officials urged a calm response to the diagnosis.
A privately contracted crew of environmental and hazardous material cleaners arrived at the apartment that Craig Spencer, 33, shared with his fiancee Morgan Dixon.
Spencer, who had worked for Doctors Without Borders in Guinea, was being treated in an isolation unit at Bellevue hospital in the city, where he was taken after displaying symptoms consistent with those caused by Ebola, including a fever of 100.3F (38C).
Officials told a press conference at Bellevue on Thursday that they were monitoring four people with whom Spencer had contact. His fiancee and two friends had been quarantined, while the fourth person, a taxi driver, was not considered to be at risk.
Spencer had been working with Doctors Without Borders on the Ebola outbreak in Guinea, one of the three west African countries worst affected by the virus. He finished his work there on 12 October and left the country on 14 October, flying home to John F Kennedy airport in New York via Europe. He arrived in New York on 17 October.
He took several trips on the New York subway in the past week, visited the Gutter bowling alley in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn on Wednesday night and took an Uber cab, all before he began to display symptoms, officials said.
They described him as a “meticulous” individual who had been carefully monitoring himself after returning from Guinea. A high fever on Thursday morning was the first time Spencer displayed symptoms which indicated Ebola, authorities said, and emphasised that it was unlikely he would have been infectious before that time. Humans are not infectious until they display symptoms.
Camera crews and reporters were gathered outside Spencer’s apartment building in the Harlem neighbourhood of Manhattan on Friday morning. Two officers from the city’s environmental police entered a gate to the side of the building and locked it behind them.
Mark Levine, the area’s city councilman, was on the sceneto try to reassure Spencer’s neighbours that they were safe. Levine said that no one, including police, had been inside Spencer’s fifth-floor apartment since the doctor was taken to hospital. “I understand he actually left the key inside deliberately,” said Levine.
Levine said that the cleaners would remove any traces of body fluids inside, along with possessions that might have been contaminated, such as bedsheets, pillowcases, toothbrushes and towels. “The apartment will be cleaned and sanitised so it can be used again safely by Dr Spencer,” said Levine. “We hope that he can return safely.”
The city councilman stressed to Spencer’s fifth-floor neighbours that none of them were in danger of contracting Ebola. “It’s not an airborne virus and it doesn’t live on surfaces for very long, so even if he touched an elevator button or doorknob, there’s no risk of contamination,” he was telling people in the neighbourhood.
Workers from the city department of health canvassed Spencer’s building and every other building on the block on Thursday evening with bilingual pamphlets containing information about the virus. Levine said a new team of 20 staff were due to arrive to canvass nearby bus stops, grocery stores and subway entrances to speak to passersby in English, French and Spanish.
Some were unconvinced. “This entire neighbourhood is worried,” said Stan Malone, who said he lived across West 147th Street from Spencer. “People want to know why they haven’t quarantined his entire building yet. Ebola is here in the city and you can bet this won’t be the last case.”
Malone said he had an aunt, an uncle and two cousins who lived two floors away from Spencer in the same building. The relatives, whom he declined to name, moved to a hotel yesterday, he said, and want to be tested for the virus today.
“There’s a lot of misconception out there, and people are scared understandably,” said Levine, the councilman. “But they have to understand that you don’t catch this by walking by someone or sitting next to them on the subway or jogging by them in the park.”
Levine said one neighbour of Spencer’s had even refused to shake the city councilman’s hand in case he, too, was infected with Ebola. “it’s absurd, but we’re trying to educate people,” said Levine.
Spencer began to feel feverish on Thursday between 10am and 11am. He contacted Doctors Without Borders immediately, which in turn contacted the New York department of health. Officials organised for him to be transported to Bellevue hospital in the city, a designated site for Ebola patients, under strictly controlled conditions.
“I know the word Ebola can spread fear just by the sound of the word,” said New York state governor Andrew Cuomo at the Thursday night press conference. “Ebola is not an airborne illness; it is contracted when a person is extremely ill and symptomatic.”
Officials urged residents of New York not to panic, and drew a comparison with the response to an outbreak in Dallas, Texas, where the city’s principal hospital bungled its initial contacts with an Ebola patient who later died, Thomas Duncan.
“I know it’s a frightening situation, I know when you watched it on the news and it was about Dallas it was frightening; that it’s here in New York is more frightening,” Cuomo said. “New York is a dense place, a lot of people are on top of each other. But the more facts you know, the less frightening the situation is.”
A preliminary test on Thursday confirmed that Spencer has the virus. Federal officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which has sent a team to New York City to assist city and state officials in the response, will carry out a further test to confirm the result.
Barack Obama spoke by telephone with Cuomo and New York mayor Bill de Blasio about the positive test, the White House said, and discussed the deployment of officials from the CDC.
