When a Liberian man named Thomas Duncan first showed up at a Dallas hospital in September 2014 with a fever and abdominal pain, he was sent home with some antibiotics. Days later, Duncan was dead from Ebola. Outbreaks of dangerous diseases like Ebola or the new respiratory coronavirus that’s killing people in Wuhan, China—cases of the latter now have appeared in other countries, including the United States—are a feature of modern life, not a bug. And it’s only a matter of time before a patient shows up at a doctor’s office somewhere in the United States suffering from what could be the next epidemic disease.
Hospital practices can expose healthcare workers and others to infection. The type of failures that resulted in two of Duncan’s nurses becoming infected with Ebola were prolific in the US healthcare system, even before the 2014 crisis. According to Nina Pham, one of the nurses who contracted Ebola, her preparation for caring for an Ebola patent “consisted of what her manager ‘Googled’ and printed out from the internet.”