re: #4 Charles Johnson

I think that Presby Dallas deserves all the criticism they are getting. The Ebola “crisis” had been in the news for weeks, if not a month, particularly when the 3 people were brought over to US for treatment, before Mr Duncan’s first visit. In fact I do recall my hospital sending out a blurb about it.

There is a culture in the private hospitals that aren’t really seen in public hospitals in regards to the indigent population and lack of insurance. Even now with the ACA in place, these private hospitals mostly serve the already insured and in places like Texas where the haven’t expanded the Medicaid rolls you still have people who are without proper insurance. Mr Duncan as I understand it did not have insurance and couldn’t use ACA anyway because he was still a Liberian national, I don’t believe he had US citizenship.

Presby Dallas completely dropped the ball and started this whole mess when they decided to send Mr Duncan home with 103 fever and some antibiotics, even after I believe the electronic chart says he told the ER that he recently travelled from West Africa. This was their first mistake.

Their next mistake was in not providing. appropriate PPE (Personal protection equipment) to the nurses who were taking care of Mr Duncan until 2 days after he was admitted the 2nd time. From what I read from the nurses union, they not only broke basic protocol of using appropriate PPE, but they also didn’t use proper protocol for disposing of infectious bio waste or of handling infectious samples. A friend told me that the actually used the tube system, a pressurized transport system (exactly like what bank drive thru use) that transport specimens to and from the lab, to transport Mr Duncan’s samples to the lab! Thats a definite no no, extremely infectious specimen such as those should be hand delivered to and from the lab.

Let’s not even get into the non-quarantine of staff or at least instructing staff to not travel for the 21 day screening time.

All that to say that yes, Presby Dallas really F’ed up.