Have you touched an Ebola Patient’s Puke, Sweat, Sh*t, or Blood? If Not, You Don’t Have Ebola.

[Ms. Toad]

100. There is a difference,

which is why the risk to anyone here is low. But the risk is not zero, and the low risk - and cost of monitoring in Northeast Ohio - would not have existed but for the folks you currently place so much trust in failing to do their job in the first place. Had their current protocols been in place in Dallas, Amber Vinson and Nina Pham would almost certainly not have contracted Ebola in the first place, and Amber Vinson would not have traveled to NE Ohio. Period.

The CDC has now acknowledged that, even followed perfectly, its protocol was inadequate. Beyond the inadequate clinical protocol, the same monitoring steps were not taken in Dallas. Summit and Cuyahoga counties are monitoring 153 people (up 11 from the monitoring chart linked to at the end of the sentence) as Dallas should have been monitoring them: http://www.odh.ohio.gov/~/media/ODH/ASSETS/Files/ebola/Daily%20Contact.ashx

No one in Dallas was doing more than Tier 3 monitoring, despite the fact that all of the staff who cared for Mr. Duncan should have been at level 1. Had they been monitoring that way, no one in Northeastern Ohio would currently be being monitored at all, since Amber Vinson would not have left Texas. The kind of tight restrictions there were in Nigeria, and are currently in place in Ohio, were completely absent in Texas.

When there is a gap in protocols, as there clearly was here, people with medical training need to use their medical knowledge to fill in the gaps - and that where I fault Amber Vinson. As someone with medical training - at a minimum - when she started having flu-like symptoms and running even a low grade fever while still in the incubation period, she should have assumed it was Ebola until proven otherwise and not gotten on a plane. We are lucky she was only in the early stages of Ebola - which keeps the risk low. Since I am related to a member of one of the Boards of Health involved, I know what is being done here and I know that the monitoring screw-ups which happened in Dallas are not happening here - BUT we should never have been put in this position (in this particular infection chain) to have to prove that we can get it right in the first place.