raconteurreport | There are, in fact, a total of four
medical isolation units in the entire United States, as we noted
yesterday, that are capable of handling infected Ebola patients near
endlessly.
Where are they, and what can they handle?
Emory University's Serious Communicable Disease Unit is in Atlanta, GA. That's where Brantly and Writebol were treated. It has three beds.
St. Patrick Hospital's ICU Isolation Unit is in Missoula MT. It has three beds.
The National Institute of Health's Special Clinical Studies Unit is in Bethesda MD. It has seven beds.
And the biggest, the Nebraska Medical Center's Biocontainment Unit is in Omaha NE. It has ten beds.
3+3+7+10=23 beds, coast to coast.
So, for the entire country, all 316,100,000+ of us, we're fully prepared to treat 23 Ebola patients at the same time. (For reference, that's how many Ebola patients Liberia had last April. It hasn't gone well.)
But the 316M-person question is, what happens when we have 24?
More happygas, anyone?
"But any major medical center could really take care of an Ebola patient," said William Schaffner, an expert on infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University's School of Medicine.
Most ICUs have isolation rooms that are used for patients suspected to have tuberculosis, SARS, Middle East respiratory syndrome or another infectious disease. Schaffner said that not much would be different for an Ebola patient, though more stringent precautions might be taken to ensure that health care workers are following all protocols.
Why yes, gosh darn it, of course they can!
Just look at how well that worked at Texas Health Presbyterian, a top-tier 968-bed acute primary hospital in Dallas, and a regional healthcare keystone in that city.
They misdiagnosed their first patient.
Their computerized EMR doesn't dump the nurse's triage notes onto the doctor's page, so critical screening information was missed.
They exposed their hospital lab to specimens that weren't safe to handle, because they didn't know Thomas Duncan needed a BL4 response and specimen handling.
They exposed doctors, nurses, staff members, patients, and visitors to Ebola unknowningly.
They sent him back into the community to expose family, friends, EMS workers, and random strangers as well.
Which led to inappropriate hazmat cleaning at his home;
the potential exposure of four public schools to the disease, which has necessitated closing them for cleaning while parents keep their children home, some withdrawing them completely;
and on and on, with 18/100/50 (depending on which number is currently operant) people under self-imposed quarantine and monitoring.
And that was a good look at how it's going to go everywhere else, the first time "shit's getting real". It's called the Normalcy Bias. "We've never had an Ebola patient walk in the door, so we never will, and we won't assume otherwise." Because ABCNNBCBS haven't been hawking any news to the contrary for months, right?
There are other problems: as noted yesterday, once you start traipsing highly infectious patients, frequently vomiting and squirting Ebola-laced body fluids everywhere, the hospital is unavailable for any other use.
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