The first Ebola NYC patient has reached the big city, raising concerns throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn in particular, as it seems he took the subway from Brooklyn to Upper Manhattan and it is impossible to know whom he was in contact with.
The case of the Ebola NYC patient has worried many since The New York Times first confirmed it last Thursday. The first patient is called Craig Spencer, and he's a doctor who had recently returned from Guinea, where he was working with Doctors Without Borders treating patients of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
Although Dr. Spencer has stated that the special protective suits he wore while treating patients in Guinea hadn't been compromised at any time, which raises further concerns about the possibility of this strain of Ebola having mutated into an airborne virus.
In any case, the Ebola NYC patient, Dr. Spencer, fell ill last Thursday and immediately contacted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), explaining his case to the authorities: he had just landed in the city from Guinea last week, and the symptoms for Ebola appear within 8 to 10 days after infection.
An ambulance was sent to pick him up and he was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan, where it was confirmed that he had indeed contracted the deadly virus.
According to CBS, New York City mayor Bill De Blasio urged citizens not to panic, and reminded the city that Ebola could only be transmitted through contact of bodily fluids and secretions, such as urine, feces, blood and vomit.
The Ebola NYC patient told authorities everything he had done since he landed in New York last week, including a trip to a bowling alley in Brooklyn earlier this week, when he had used the subway to reach Wiliamsburg.
Currently, at least three people that were in close contact with Dr. Spencer have been placed in isolation to see if they present symptoms and avoid them possibly becoming contagious, in one of the world's biggest cities with over 8 million people.
