The Apology
Remember Thomas Eric Duncan? He was patient zero who first brought the Ebola virus to the US. He is the Typhoid Mary who lied about his contact with an Ebola victim in Liberia. He is dead and now two nurses are infected because of him. Of course you all know this by now and it is an extremely sad story. I had written before that the nephew of Duncan made some claims of racism in his care. That should have tipped us all off that a lawsuit was coming. Well, I guess the hospital feels it too and has made an apology to the family of the man who started this debacle. This article describes how “the hospital was ‘deeply sorry’ for the way Duncan’s case was handled.”
I do not know the actual specifics of this case. I have used this medium to describe the problems of technology and how it decreases communication amongst staff. I said that from what I heard, letting someone leave with a fever, from Liberia, and treating their “virus” with antibiotics doesn’t sound like great treatment. But this is all hearsay. That being said, does it sit well that the guy (on his behalf) who started this whole mess is the one who gets the apology and is the one suing as if he was the victim?
I wouldn’t be too hard on the guy, Doug.
Apparently, he had been planning the trip to the US for quite some time (took a while to get the visa,etc.), so this was not a spur of the moment run for his life, he was not certain that the girl he had helped had Ebola (yeah, it’s not just a river in Egypt, but still, lots of people get sick and die with dysentery over there), and he did tell the ER staff more than once that he’d just come from Liberia.
Sure, in the best of all possible worlds he should have isolated himself (and died on the dirt floor of a tin shack), but, let’s be honest, most of us would have done the same thing in his situation.
The American doctors sure high-tailed it back here as soon as they got sick.