Feds on defense over Ebola

Federal officials are facing heightened scrutiny over their response to Ebola in the United States after a second Dallas healthcare worker contracted the virus. 

Representatives from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were notably absent from a Dallas city press conference early Wednesday morning. Later in the day, agency director Thomas Frieden faced a barrage of questions about his oversight. 

{mosads}Frieden said the CDC is planning for more Ebola cases in the coming days as a wide group of healthcare workers are monitored for symptoms of the virus.

He also said people on an Ebola watch list would not be permitted to travel after news broke that the second healthcare worker, identified by family members as 29-year-old Amber Vinson, traveled on a commercial flight earlier in the week just prior to showing symptoms.

The CDC has sent a team to Dallas to monitor care at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, which is facing its own questions about a series of missteps in its care for the original Ebola patient, Thomas Eric Duncan. Duncan died Oct. 8. 

Frieden expressed regret this week that the agency did not oversee the care itself sooner, saying a swifter response could have prevented the first infection. 

“I wish we had put a team like this on the ground the day the patient, the first patient, was diagnosed,” he said Tuesday at a press conference. “That might have prevented this infection. But we will do that from today onward with any case, anywhere in the U.S.” 

Both healthcare workers in Dallas were in extensive contact with Duncan prior to his death, officials said. Medical records indicated that nurses wore no special protective gear for two days before Duncan’s case was confirmed to be Ebola, according to the Dallas Morning News. 

Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwell on Wednesday said the federal government could have provided better oversight at the hospital, which has come under scathing criticism from a national union representing nurses.

Burwell didn’t offer a direct response to questions about whether she had confidence in the Dallas hospital during an interview on “The Today Show.”

The nurses union said hospital staff were not trained in Ebola care, were given incomplete protective gear, and continued to care for other patients at the same time, potentially putting them at risk. 

“There was no advanced preparedness on what to do with the patient. There was no protocol,” the statement from National Nurses United read. “There was no system. The nurses were asked to call the infectious disease department” with questions but did not receive answers, the group said.

While the CDC did send a team initially to help with contact tracing and monitoring, Frieden said on Tuesday that it should have included more infection control specialists.

“I think in retrospect, with 20/20 hindsight, we could have sent a more robust infection control team and been more hands-on with the hospital about how this could be managed,” he said.

The CDC has at times struggled to coordinate its response and messaging in Dallas with the city’s hospitals and state officials over the last month. The federal agency deferred to the hospital on criticisms of Duncan’s care, though officials have acknowledged that mistakes were made when medical staff failed to communicate his travel history. Duncan contracted Ebola in Liberia before flying to the U.S.

Appearing Wednesday morning on CBS, Burwell defended the administration’s latest steps to improve oversight at the Dallas hospital, even as Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings at the local press conference warned things would get worse before they would get better.

“Everyone knows that right now we are in the middle of an investigation to understand where there was a breach so we can better understand how the first healthcare worker, and now the second healthcare worker, have contracted Ebola,” Burwell said on “This Morning.”

“We’ll continue to work on that and we did yesterday, whenever there is something that we see that we can improve upon, we will do that.”

Fifty other healthcare workers are being monitored closely for the virus in Dallas. 

The spread of Ebola is unprecedented in the United States, which had never seen a case prior to this year.

— Sarah Ferris contributed to this story, which was last updated at 4:16 p.m.