- Dirk VanderHart
- Providence Health executive Dave Underriner, Tri-County Health Officer Paul Lewis, and State Health Officer Katrina Hedberg at a press conference this afternoon
A mystery woman—HIPAA says you can know nothing about her—was recently in either Liberia, Sierra Leone, or Guinea. This woman came to Portland at some non-publicly-disclosable point, and whether she lives here or is visiting no one’s saying. She’s been in constant contact with county health officials, reporting her symptom-free status twice daily even as she traveled about freely.
Then this morning, the woman’s temperature shot above 102 degrees. And it stayed there. She’s been in a locked area of Providence Milwaukie Hospital since about 1:30 this afternoon, and there is some concern that Portland may have the country’s latest case of Ebola.
This is the scenario state and local health officials just laid out in a bland conference room in the state office building on NE Oregon. The important thing? There’s no reason to believe anyone else has the Ebola virus, if this woman does. You need to have symptoms to spread the disease, and she didn’t until this morning.
Even that line of thinking is still preliminary: the cause of the woman’s fever is very much in question, and she had no known contact with the afflicted while in Africa. She was living with people in Portland, the officials said, and those people have voluntarily quarantined themselves in their home.
“We think the system worked almost flawlessly,” Dr. Paul Lewis, the tri-county health officer, told reporters, while batting aside questions about the woman’s activities, travels, living situation, and age. “There is no risk to the public.”
So complete was Lewis’ reluctance to give detailed answers that it’s not even clear when we might know whether the woman has Ebola. The blood has to be packaged—carefully—and sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, the final arbiter in these matters. It also might be sent to another, nearer lab, which can give a preliminary assessment. And multiple tests are required in order to guarantee a person doesn’t have the Ebola virus, so that might take time.
Also at the conference was Dave Underriner, a regional executive with Providence Health Services. He says Providence Milwaukie has serendipitously been training for something like this, and that the hospital has the proper equipment and something like 150 staffers ready to handle the virus.
Bottom line: Even if Ebola has been among us, Portland’s top health officials say its under control. You have no reason to worry. Happy Halloween.
Update, 5:06 pm: The Oregonian, citing an unnamed source, reports the woman is from Liberia, and is just visiting Portland.
Every city in the country is perpetrating it’s own Ebola scare.
It’s just like when the FBI entrapped that stupid Somali kid in Pioneer Square, advising him to press a fake button on Black Friday. The FBI knew there was no bomb, because it was their own, fake button. They knew the kid was unarmed, and they were right there with him. The Portland Police lied when they said that they weren’t in on the gag, because I was there, and I saw the place surrounded.
Why did abusive law enforcement need to make such a big spectacle of the arrest?
The FBI already had the kid in custody when they told him to push the fake button. The whole point was to terrorize Portlanders over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, so that they would be willing to trade freedom for supposed security and in the future be willing to give carte blanche to the Police and FBI for every abusive action that they decide to perpetrate on innocent civilians.
Ebola is such an aggressive virus that it always burns itself out by killing all the hosts, before an epidemic can spread very far. Therefore, Ebola can only be kept alive in the laboratory. Some government or government sponsored terrorist organization is deliberately infecting multiple populations in order to institute Martial Law all over the World.
A lot of people will die from Ebola, but remember, terrorism is called terrorism, because terrorists are impotent to actually kill everybody. Terrorism is psychological warfare. Portland once had internment camps for Japanese Americans out at Jantzen Beach. Even Chinese Americans had to carry ID cards so as not to be mistaken as Japanese descent.
Portlanders didn’t do shit to stop that then, and neither did any other US citizens in any other states where concentration camps were located. When the homeless and the politically incorrect show up at OHSU with a standard case of the sniffles, they will be rounded up, sent off to a concentration camp, never to be seen nor heard from again.
Queen’s Hospital in Honolulu recently issued a press release that they had a possible Ebola patient. After all the local media alarmed the Public, the hospital said to never mind, because the figured that the guy didn’t have Ebola after all. Queen’s Hospital didn’t even bother to test the patient for Ebola. They didn’t test for the virus before the first press release, nor before they latter said that he was not infected.
Queen’s Hospital admitted that they never tested the patient for Ebola at any time. Why would a responsible hospital issue a false alarm and have the arrogance to not even put up a pretense of concern enough to even test for the virus?
What this accomplished was to scare the Public, making them fearful of anyone who might possibly be accused of being infected.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/canada-joins-australia-in-restricting-visas-amid-ebola-scare/story-e6frg6so-1227109697194 Canada joins Australia in restricting Visas. Must be nice to have a government that protects the citizens.
Hippa does not cover non resident aliens so then she must live here on a visa or be a citizen.