Weekend Ebola Story You May Have Missed Raises Serious Concerns

This weekend story may be cause for real concern about the ebola virus in the U.S. This may undermine the reassurances that our more "developed" health care system will prevent any serious spread of a disease that we now know has landed on our shores.

DALLAS—A day after saying that doctors didn’t receive a Liberian patient’s travel history due to an electronics records glitch, the Dallas hospital that initially failed to admit the first person diagnosed with Ebola in the U.S. has changed its version of events, stating that information that he had come from Africa was in fact available to doctors.

Remember that many stories reported on weekends, really any time beginning late Friday afternoon through Sunday, find far fewer viewers or listeners than news during the week. So if you scan weekend news, you can sometimes find tasty tidbits that most people have never seen or heard. In this case, we're talking more porterhouse steak than tasty tidbit. But steak or tidbit, we should find out today whether this story winds up on more plates than it did this past Saturday. If not, we're looking at an attempt to keep this news relatively quiet. And if that's the case, we may have real cause for worry about the future of the ebola virus in the U.S.

While we don't question the fact that the U.S. health care system should be able to far better contain ebola than the African nations where the disease has now spread in alarming fashion, if the system doesn't function as designed we've got big problems. And the failure of health care professionals to put two and two together when they released an individual with ebola symptoms who had arrived from Africa rather than initiating the procedures put into place by CDC to prevent the spread of the disease by keeping him quarantined and under treatment would be bad enough. Now add to that the fact that a woman's apartment this individual, whose name is Duncan, had visited sat unattended by hazmat teams due to a reluctance of the hazmat professionals to enter it:

The woman Mr. Duncan had come to visit in the U.S. and three of her relatives, who had been ordered Wednesday to remain in the apartment where Mr. Duncan fell ill, were moved Friday evening to a Dallas house that officials had secured through a faith-based organization, said Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins.

The apartment, which hadn’t been cleared of materials for days due to a lack of permits to move hazardous materials on Texas roads, was finally being cleaned out by a hazmat team Friday evening, and a vendor with the proper permit was set to move the materials in sealed containers to a final destination, Judge Jenkins said.

Perhaps the best comment - again over the weekend - comes from this Wall Street Journal opinion:

Ebola is stoppable and there’s little reason to think that the world’s leading disease experts at the CDC aren’t ready to combat its spread—except these days government competence is all too often exposed as a fragile veneer. When an elite corps like the Secret Service can’t remember to lock the White House’s front door and alleged health technocrats can’t build a working ObamaCare website for less than $2 billion, a sense of low-level worry about Ebola seems more than reasonable.

The only objection one might raise to this reasonable comment would be that "a sense of low-level worry may be a gross understatement. Let's hope not.

Again, we'll learn a lot more about what's really going on, and the degree of worry appropriate to the situation in today's media reports. If there's serious follow-up directly dealing with the issues we just discussed, it'll be a reasonably good sign that authorities have recognized and are attempting to shore up the weak links - maybe more accurately describes as holes - in the system on which we will rely to keep Ebola under control.