This week, when I arrived at my physical therapy appointment at Yale Orthopedics in New Haven, I noticed something new: a sign and information about Ebola had been posted. Below the poster(s), flyers. I didn't think more of it other than that Yale was just sharing what hospitals around the country and the world are.
It was only after leaving my appointment that I realized that a patient had been admitted late the previous night, showing signs of Ebola. A graduate student, he had not exhibited signs of the illness upon returning from Liberia, but apparently now had a fever.
For a few hours that day, Thurs. the 16th, I didn't want to admit it but I was scared. The building I'd entered connects via overhead bridge to the hospital. Thankfully, I have a fairly fatalistic view about life and death so don't allow myself to get too rattled by scares.
Yet, when news came that his Ebola test was negative, I was relieved.
Now I could focus on other matters: how the hospital, officials and the press were handling this. For, leaving the area that afternoon a Fox CT reporter asked if he could interview me on camera. I thought it over, then decided perhaps it was my opportunity to express my concern that the flyers weren't given to us upon entering the building. When pressed, though, if I thought this patient should have been isolated upon his return from Western Africa, I declined to say more than that it was not my decision (there may have been more; I get somewhat nervous on camera.)
When the piece aired, I was glad that all he got from LAURIE WIEGLER - PHYSICAL THERAPY PATIENT was that we should all "remain skeptical; and if it doesn't turn out to be Ebola, then great."
Then another thought occurred to me: were some journalists in the area going to be secretly disappointed that this big story wasn't going to become national news? Of course I wanted to squelch that notion, but it dawned on me that had this patient been positive, my footage could have gone viral.
Officials from the hospital and the university had to explain themselves during what felt like an uncomfortable news conference. Some of us still remember how Yale had to deal with the disappearance and then ultimately what turned out to be the murder of student Annie Le in 2009, and in 2011, the death of chemistry studentMichelle Dufault, when her hair got caught in a lathe late at night at the lab.
Surely, the last thing Yale needs right now is more bad news, I thought. So maybe that's why I saw at least one official who should be grimacing smiling. I told my mother later that, in fairness, many brilliant but nerdy people smile at the wrong times.
This wasn't the main concern, though, so much as what I started to sense from the press. We're not a giant monolith, one huge mass of course; so some members of the press. A Harvard School of Public Health survey back in August showed that 40 percent of Americans fear an Ebola outbreak here; so I wondered, how many reporters are mocking these people? How many "liberal elites" are laughing, snickering at how little the masses know about science!
For those of us who got a B or a C in bio and chem, such snickering is a reminder of the papers we wished were graded higher in 1987. For those who failed science classes, I can only imagine the anger and sense of helplessness felt when trying to understand that Ebola, while highly infectious, is not highly contagious.
Note: there is still so much we don't know about this terrifying virus, and so I hope that reporters, even the gifted science reporters out there, remain very humble when it comes to communicating what they "know". And the news is changing rapidly.
If nothing else, one doesn't want to be made the fool if an entire city in Texas comes down with it or if the best "science" later turns out to be just an intermediary step to greater breakthroughs.
And more than anything, the U.S. needs to keep politics out of it, and continue funneling money into finding a cure.
Photo: courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Note: As of Oct. 18, the identity of the patient has not been released, but WTNH Ch. 8 in New Haven reported the patient is male, and the New Haven Register reported that he's one of two students from the Public Health Dept at Yale who was in Liberia. The Register also quoted the Yale newspaper as saying he'd had contact with the NBC freelance cameraman, Ashoka Mukpo, who has contracted Ebola. This was according to a source who declined to be identified. ( Correction: earlier I said "declined to be quoted", in error.)
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