Health care workers treating Thomas Eric Duncan in a hospital isolation unit didn’t wear protective hazardous-material suits for two days until tests confirmed the Liberian man had Ebola — a delay that potentially exposed perhaps dozens of hospital workers to the virus, according to medical records.
The 3-day window of Sept. 28-30 is now being targeted by investigators for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as the key time during which health care workers may have been exposed to the deadly virus by Duncan, who died Oct. 8 from the disease.
Duncan was suspected of having Ebola when he was admitted to a hospital isolation unit Sept. 28, and he developed projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea later that day, according to medical records his family turned over to The Associated Press.
But workers at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas did not abandon their gowns and scrubs for hazmat suits until tests came back positive for Ebola about 2 p.m. on Sept. 30, according to details of the records released by AP.
The misstep – one in a series of potentially deadly mishandling of Duncan — raises the likelihood that other health care workers could have been infected. More than 70 workers were exposed to him before he died, but hospital officials have not indicated how many treated him in the initial few days.
Hospital officials have likewise not responded to repeated requests for comment about what types of protective gear was used the first few days, and why officials felt a need to change the gear being used on Sept. 30.
Yeah, I’d focus on that 3 day window. Sounds kinda important. And it puts discussion of whether personal protective protocols failed in a different light.
Instinctual reactions are quick and automatic, useful in times when the facts are not known or there is not enough time to process what little is known. Analytical reasoning is much slower and much harder; if we relied on analysis alone, decisions about risk would paralyze us.
In everyday life, the mind juggles the two methods of risk assessment. Research into this process, some of it by the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his research partner Amos Tversky, demonstrates that instinctual biases can alter how people gauge the odds in making a wide variety of presumably rational decisions, from investing money to preparing for disasters.
For example, most people appreciate that a chance of infection of one in a 100 million is near zero. But if a friend says he knows an infected person, then our instinctive risk-assessment system is much more likely to focus on numerator than the denominator. Am I the one in 100 million? Me?
“The system often flips from one extreme to another, from ignoring risks altogether and then overreacting,” said George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University.
And we are not immune to it.
By the way, congrats to the surprise KC Royals on making the World Series.
— @MarcACaputo
More politics and policy below the fold.
