City's mayor says NYC fully prepared to deal with Ebola
Bill De Blasio, New York City's mayor, said the city was "fully prepared" to deal with the Ebola virus.
Craig Spencer, a physician living in Harlem, was taken to hospital in New York on Thursday after displaying symptoms similar with those caused by Ebola, including a fever of 38C – lower than the 39.5C that was initial reported by health officials - and initial tests confirmed he resulted positive to the virus.
Spencer arrived back in New York from Guinea on 17 October and federal officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which has sent a team to New York City to assist city and state officials in the response, said they will conduct further tests to confirm the result.
Officials told a press conference at Bellevue hospital on Thursday that four people, including his fiancée, Morgan Dixon, and two friends with whom Spencer had contact were being monitored. Dixon and the two friends had been quarantined, while the fourth person, a taxi driver, was not considered to be at risk at the moment.
“I know the word Ebola right now can spread fear just by the sound of the word,” said New York state governor Andrew Cuomo at a press conference. “Ebola is not an airborne illness, it is contracted when a person is extremely ill and symptomatic.”
Authorities urged New York residents not to panic, adding that while the size of New York could lead to concerns, officials were determined to disclose as many details about the virus as possible, in a bid to prevent widespread panic.
“I know it’s a frightening situation, I know when you watched it on the news and it was about Dallas it was frightening; that it’s here in New York is more frightening,” Cuomo said.
“New York is a dense place, a lot of people are on top of each other. But the more facts you know, the less frightening the situation is."
Most of the concerns related to a possible spread of the disease have focused around New York’s status as a transport hub, as the airports in the metropolitan area receive most of the of the passengers arriving in the US from west Africa every day.
John F Kennedy international airport and Newark, New Jersey’s airport, are among only five in the US permitted to accept passengers from the worst-affected countries – Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia - and, from Monday, passengers from these countries will be monitored for 21 days after arriving in the US.