The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Moving the patient
The next step was to transport the patient from his home to the hospital.
The actual trip took around five minutes, estimates Tim Craven, who sat in the back of the ambulance with the patient.
But prep for emergency personnel took hours.
During that time some word of the operation leaked out across the city. Yale-New HavenHospital put outword of the possible case just after 9 a.m. Thursday; the first news conference on thematter began at about 12:45 p.m. Thursday.
On Wednesday, after receiving a call from YNHH, Craven and other managers met at AMR’s headquarters to get gear ready to protect themselves and the ambulance from being exposed to any possible virus. That included white body suits, goggles and gloves to shield emergency personnel and sheets of thick plastic needed to wrap the ambulance.
They took extrawith them for the patient they would later transport to the hospital.
Everyone first met up at Yale-New Haven Hospital.
By 10:15 p.m., when Harp arrived, she witnessed a horde of people working in a calm, controlled, environment, she said. There were police officers, fire and EMS personnel, people dressed in hazmat suits, hospital personnel, health personnel, bustling about to get everyone and everything ready for the patient.
“It was calm. They were running through the protocol of what they would do and everybody indicated they knew what that was,” Harp said.
The hospital already had a plan in place for the possibility of an Ebola patient. It had been practiced and protective equipment was on hand. Four intensivecare rooms have been closed in preparation: two at the main campus, one at the St. Raphael campus and one at the ShorelineMedical Center in Guilford.
Late Wednesday and into Thursday, managers from the AMR ambulance service andmembers of theNewHaven FireDepartmentworked to get everyone ready for transport. All the prep work was done at the hospital.
Craven and James Schwartz, who would later drive the ambulance, were dressed with help from the Fire Department. Craven said they were taped into their gear very tightly, which left no room for nervousness in entering the home of a patient who may have Ebola.
With an emergency escort, the ambulance quickly arrived at the patient’s home. Craven went in to meet the patient, who was very calm and understanding of the circumstances.
“I couldn’t have asked for abetterpatient,” Cravensaid later.
Once inside, Craven radioed to a co-worker outside, letting him know what size suit they needed for the patient. Once the patient was suited up in the necessary protective gear, hewalked to the ambulance, which operatedwith Craven in the back, and Schwartz at the wheel. They got another emergency escort back to the hospital, which Craven said took no time at all — while he and the patient made small talk in the back.
Meanwhile, Harp and other emergency personnel not involved in the transport weremeeting upstairs at the hospital to discuss the procedure. Harp learned the protocol: the patient would remain in a suit when he arrived at the hospital and be taken to an negative pressure room.
She went downstairs just as the patient was being taken out of the ambulance — and he was able to walk into the hospital.
“There was nothing that you could see other than that he had this suit on that would make you know that he was sick,” Harp said.
The patientwas processed and brought into a specific zero-pressure room. in a designated spot.
Then AMR employees began their decontamination process in Yale’s hazmat room — where they were sprayed down and decontaminated, at first wearing the protective gear, to ensure they didn’t spread anything when removing the gear. Theywereaidedbyfirefighters— still dressed in the protective gear — who then undressed and decontaminated each other and the room itself.
Harp and officialsmet upstairs again, once the patient was inside. They began talking among themselves and had their own questions — and came up with a list to ask the patient. They had a conference call of sorts with the patient to askmore questions to get a better idea of the situation.
The patient’s fever was low, lower than the threshold of 100.4 degrees to raise alarm of a fever related to Ebola.
The patient also had diarrhea — but Harp learned fromdoctors he had been on very strong antibiotics that could have been the cause.
The patientwas originally supposed to return to the United States onOct. 4, Harp said, but kept himself in Liberia because he was sick.
The more she heard, the more Harp said she thought it might not be Ebola.
The patient eventually came back to the United States on Oct. 11, Harp said, and wouldn’t have been allowed to come back without being fever-free for 24 hours.
“As I started to process all these things, we learned there could be answers to these things other than Ebola. But we wanted to err on the side of caution — I don’t think anyone was really nervousorupset that itmightbe Ebola — and even if it was, I felt confident that Yale New HavenHospital could handle it,” Harp said.
Early Thursday, officials decided they would meet again at 10 a.m. at the city’s Emergency Operations System and Harp got home by around 2:30 a.m.
The formal news conference with Yale staff and Harp took place at the hospital after 12:30 p.m. and included Rep. Rosa DeLauro.
DeLauro and her staff were in contact with the CDC throughout the day as they awaited test results that were sent to a lab in Massachusetts earlier in the day.
A second meeting took place at 4 p.m., duringwhich DeLauro broke the news that the test for Ebola was negative. Harp said they wanted to wait until officials at Yale heard the same results before sharing it. Once that happened and the announcement was made and the media began to report it, the city worked to notify residents that the results were negative.
Though Harp said she learned it’s likely that unless a person has come recently from Liberia, Sierra Leone or Guinea and is exhibiting flu-like symptoms — it’s just the flu — she wants the city to continue to take precautions until Ebola is ruled out in similar situations.
“If they haven’t been out of the country and they have flu-like symptoms, it’s probably the flu, butwe stillwant to take normal precautions,” she said.