New York City's health department is actively tracking 289 people inside the United States for signs of Ebola infection, using an around-the-clock preventive monitoring program that is thought to be the largest in the country, the
New York Times reports.
To date, none of the people being tracked by New York since the operation launched on Oct. 24 is thought to have developed the disease, and none is under quarantine, the Times reports.
But not every person on the city's list has been accounted for, and keeping close daily tabs on several dozen people considered potentially at risk for Ebola is proving to be a demanding task, the Times reports.
City health officials defended the monitoring, by a team of 470 departmental employees tapped expressly for the assignment, as a better approach than outright quarantines.
The Times reports that as of last week, at least 650 people were being tracked nationwide under similar programs, with the New York program responsible for 289 — or 44 percent — of that total number.
Two-thirds of the city's 289 watch-listed people recently arrived in New York City from three countries — Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone — where the latest and most widespread outbreak of the deadly virus began earlier this year, the Times reports.
The rest are health and public safety workers who transported and cared for Dr. Craig Spencer, a New York City resident who fell ill with the disease in October after he returned from treating Ebola patients in Guinea, the Times reports.
Spencer went home on Tuesday from the city's Bellevue Hospital after he was declared fully recovered and disease-free.
The people being tracked are required to take their temperatures twice daily and check in by telephone with city health officials every day for 21 days — the known incubation period for Ebola.
Not everybody on the list is following the instructions diligently, the Times reports; some have to be chased down by specialists who work the phones in multiple languages at the city's high-tech Ebola command center in Queens.
Some of the travelers to the United States — usually arriving through Kennedy International Airport — left incomplete or incorrect contact information with health screeners. Others do not check in every day, or have traveled outside the city without providing updated contact information.
Successful daily contact percentages "fluctuate," and sometimes health researchers — the city's "disease detectives" — ask the police for help locating people, the Times reports.
Four people on the city's list of 289 have not been found at all, the Times reports.
Among the smaller group of people exposed to Ebola patient Spencer — referred to as "the index case" — workers at Bellevue Hospital "have sometimes been tricky to reach, health officials conceded," the Times reports.
"They tend to resent being checked on, often work late shifts, and are not always in the mood to report their temperatures at 5 a.m.," the Times reports.
The program will cost millions of dollars, which New York wants the federal government to help cover, and a city health official told the Times that the operation will probably continue in some form "until the crisis in Africa is fully addressed."
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