Again I refer you to the threat of panic.
As Ebola Fears Spread, Ohio and Texas Close Some Schools
By MANNY FERNANDEZ
OCTOBER 16, 2014
DALLAS — An Ebola-infected nurse’s air travel between Dallas and Cleveland has sent ripples of concern through at least two states, leading to school closings and voluntary isolations.
Schools in Texas and Ohio were closed on Thursday after officials learned that students and an adult had either been on the flight with the nurse, Amber Joy Vinson, or had contact with her while she was visiting the Akron area.
Both Ms. Vinson and another nurse who contracted Ebola, Nina Pham, were part of the medical team that treated an Ebola patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. Ms. Vinson traveled from Cleveland to Dallas the day before she showed symptoms of the disease.
In Akron, Ohio, officials dismissed students at the Resnik Community Learning Center at midday and said it would remain closed until Monday. In a letter to parents, the schools superintendent in Akron, David W. James, said that “a parent at the school had spent time with Ebola patient Amber Vinson when she visited the area this past weekend.”
Video | Mayor of Ohio Town on Ebola PrecautionsMayor David Kline of Tallmadge, Ohio, where the second Dallas nurse to contract Ebola spent the weekend, talks about safety precautions.
Mr. James said the student at the school had not meet with Ms. Vinson, who was transferred to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta on Wednesday night, but that the parent and the student were being isolated.
In Central Texas, the superintendent of the Belton Independent School District, south of Waco, said that a student at Sparta Elementary School and a student at North Belton Middle School had been on the same flight as Ms. Vinson on Monday.
The superintendent, Susan Kincannon, said in a statement that officials had decided to shut the two schools plus a third, the Belton Early Childhood School, so they could thoroughly clean and disinfect the schools and the buses that served them this week.
The two students were on the flight on Monday and then attended classes on Tuesday and Wednesday, the statement said. Though state and local health officials cleared the children to return to school, their parents decided to keep them home for 21 days, the maximum incubation period of the virus.
Health care specialists expressed skepticism about the closings.
“It’s not a rational decision,” said Dr. Andrew T. Pavia, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Utah. “And it’s harmful, in that it’s going to further spread misunderstanding and irrational fear.”
Dr. Paul A. Offit, the chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, likened the response to the early days of the AIDS epidemic “when people were afraid to walk into a grocery store and pick up a piece of fruit because they didn’t know who’d touched it.”
“This isn’t flu or smallpox,” Dr. Offit said. “It’s not spread by droplet transmission. As long as nobody kissed the person on the plane, they’re safe.”
A spokesman for the C.D.C, Thomas W. Skinner, said that the agency had not advised the schools to close.
“We are not aware of any medical reason that would require them to close these schools,” Mr. Skinner said. “We are developing guidance for K-12 school officials that will hopefully help them manage situations like this one.”
On Wednesday, C.D.C. officials had emphasized that the passengers on the plane were a low-risk group. Because Ms. Vinson did not have a fever and did not have nausea or vomiting on the plane, the risk “to any around that individual on the plane would have been extremely low,” Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the C.D.C. director, told reporters.
The Eagle Mountain-Saginaw Independent School District, in Fort Worth, did not close any schools but it announced that one family would be isolated for three weeks because a member of the household had flown to Dallas on Flight 1143. The person who was aboard the plane, the district said, works at the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth, and officials said the decision to isolate the family was made in consultation with the military.
In Solon, a Cleveland suburb of about 23,000, two schools were closed on Thursday because a district employee returned to Ohio “on a different flight, but perhaps the same aircraft, as the Texas nurse with Ebola,” the district said in an email to parents.
And officials of two major health systems in Cleveland — the Cleveland Clinic and MetroHealth — said that a group of nurses had been placed on leave because they were aboard Ms. Vinson’s first flight, from Dallas to Ohio, on Friday.
“The decision to put those nurses on paid leave really has to do with decreasing anxiety,” Dr. Jennifer Hanrahan, the chairwoman of MetroHealth’s infectious disease control committee, said at a news conference. “It’s not because of any perceived risk to them or to anyone.”
Aultman Hospital in Canton, which had five nurses aboard the flight, said it would also place employees on leave. “As a further precaution, we have reviewed the assignments of those five nurses and identified the patients in their direct care,” the hospital said in a statement. “We are in the process of contacting those patients to make sure they are fully informed.”
At least seven people were in isolation in Ohio on Thursday, with most of them in Summit County, which includes Akron and is just south of Cleveland. Dr. Marguerite Erme, the medical director for Summit County Public Health, said at a news conference that those people “had some contact” with Ms. Vinson.
Dr. Erme’s announcement came a day after the Ohio Department of Health opened an Ebola-focused call center staffed by nurses and other public health officials. The state epidemiologist, Dr. Mary DiOrio, said that the 24-hour hotline “will provide timely, accurate, credible information about Ebola and the state’s response.”
In Belton, the decision to shut the three schools kept roughly 1,800 children at home Thursday.
Ms. Kincannon, the superintendent, said two students who are siblings were accompanied by their parents aboard the Frontier flight from Cleveland to Dallas on Monday. Federal privacy laws prohibit her from releasing any identifying information about them, she said. The mother and father were also considered at risk, she said.
“We’ve been in contact with their parents and everyone is doing fine,” Ms. Kincannon said.
As of midday Thursday, the district had not made a decision on when the schools would be reopened, she said.
Questions continued to be raised about why, and how, Ms. Vinson was allowed to travel on either leg of her trip.
Ms. Vinson and other health care workers had been under a so-called self-monitoring regimen, and she was checking her temperature twice a day on her own.
Ms. Vinson flew from Dallas to Cleveland on Friday, because those doing self-monitoring have no restrictions on their movements or travel. Public health experts have criticized the C.D.C. for not putting all of the hospital workers who had contact with Mr. Duncan under intensive monitoring, as opposed to the more loosely followed self-monitoring regimen.
On Sunday, while Ms. Vinson was still in Ohio, Ms. Pham was confirmed to have the disease. Health officials said Thursday that Ms. Pham was being flown to the National Institutes of Health outside Washington from.
Following Ms. Pham’s diagnosis last week, C.D.C. officials switched Ms. Vinson’s status from self-monitoring to actual monitoring by officials. Dr. Frieden initially said that because Ms. Vinson was at that point being monitored, she should not have flown on the flight back to Dallas on Monday night. Although her temperature did not meet the fever threshold of 100.4, Ms. Vinson reported to health officials that her temperature at the time she traveled was 99.5.
But hours after Dr. Frieden spoke, it became clear that the disease centers had been aware that she was going to board the plane and allowed her to do so.
A federal health official said Ms. Vinson called the C.D.C. before boarding the plane and reported having the slightly elevated temperature of 99.5. Because it was thought the protective gear she wore while treating the Ebola patient would have kept her safe, and because her temperature did not exceed the fever threshold, she fell into a category not covered by C.D.C. guidelines and was not forbidden from boarding the plane.
“I don’t think we actually said she could fly, but they didn’t tell her she couldn’t fly,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. He said the error was on the part of the disease centers, not the nurse.
“She called us,” he said. “I really think this one is on us.”
Jack Healy and David Montgomery contributed reporting from Dallas, Donald McNeil and Jad Mouawad from New York, and Alan Blinder from Atlanta
