o HOSPITALS
The government is trying to identify up to 20 hospitals around the country that are designated Ebola referral centers. An emphasis has been on reviewing hospitals in the five cities with airports where all travelers from West Africa are now being funneled. The FAST teams have already been sent to three of them — New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C. The other two cities are Atlanta and Newark. The government hopes to release a list of primary Ebola hospitals in those five cities this week, CDC officials said.
Meanwhile, federal, state or local officials have already named some hospitals. CDC officials confirmed that one is Emory University Hospital in Atlanta — which already has been treating Ebola patients. In Chicago, local health officials this week said four leading hospitals have agreed to handle Ebola patients — Rush University Medical Center, the University of Chicago Medical Center, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, and Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. New York state officials have said they have designated eight hospitals to handle patients diagnosed with Ebola: New York City’s Bellevue Hospital Center, Mount Sinai Hospital, New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, Montefiore Hospital Center; North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System; Upstate University Hospital in Syracuse; University of Rochester Medical Center, and Stony Brook University Hospital on Long Island.
o OTHER TEAMS
On Sunday, the Pentagon said it’s building a 30-person medical support team that could go to help civilian hospitals deal with a future appearance of Ebola. The team is to include 20 critical care nurses, five doctors trained in infectious disease, and five trainers in infectious disease protocols. The military team has a different orientation — they’ll be there to provide medical care if a hospital needs more hands. The CERT teams are not there to care for patients. They would be involved in testing, coordinating communications with the public, ensuring that hospital workers are properly protected, and helping to track down people an infected person was in contact with, explained Dr. John T. Brooks, a CDC official who oversees the teams.
The CDC also has teams in Ohio and Texas working on Ebola, Brooks said. They are not FAST or CERT teams. They were sent to help officials in those states to help track and prepare for potential cases related to Duncan or to a nurse who treated him and traveled to the Cleveland area.