New Yorkers interviewed by BuzzFeed News reacted with equanimity to the news that one of their own tested positive for Ebola.
A U.S. Postal Service worker removes a face mask while wearing gloves as he departs at the building where Dr. Craig Spencer lives, in New York on October 24.
Eduardo Munoz / Reuters
NEW YORK CITY — New York woke up on Friday to gray skies and the news that one of its residents had tested positive for the Ebola virus. And then it went on about its business.
The infected New Yorker is Dr. Craig Spencer, an international emergency medicine expert affiliated with Columbia University. Spencer was diagnosed with the virus late on Thursday, just days after he returned to the city from Guinea, where he had been treating Ebola patients with the international charity Doctors Without Borders. Guinea is one of three countries in West Africa where the virus has become a full-on epidemic, killing more than 5,000 people.
Spencer had been closely monitoring his health since arriving in the United States, and caught his symptoms at a very early stage, officials said. He was immediately transported to Bellevue Hospital, where he has been isolated in a facility designed to care for patients with contagious diseases. Since people infected with Ebola do not become contagious until their symptoms manifest in full force, it is extremely unlikely that anyone in New York caught the virus from Spencer.
Still, news of the diagnosis — and of the fact that Spencer had used public transportation and visited several popular destinations before testing positive for the virus — spread like wildfire across New York.
But despite the media frenzy around Spencer, city life went on almost as usual. People went to work, rode the subway, and generally behaved like New Yorkers. By the end of the day, the restaurant where Spencer had dinner on the night before his diagnosis had opened for business as usual.
In fact, it may well be that the biggest disruption of city life was caused by the news media, which set up camp outside Spencer's apartment, work place, and the hospital where he is being treated.
The scene outside Dr. Craig Spencer's apartment in Harlem, on Friday.
Nicolas Medina Mora
On Friday morning, the scene in Spencer's neighborhood of West Harlem did not seem out of the ordinary. But his block, at Broadway and West 147th Street, was swarmed by camera crews and newspaper reporters.
His neighbors, who had been allowed to stay at their apartments, walked out to work to find a wall of cameras and microphones. BuzzFeed News reached to four of them for comment. All of them tacitly declined to be interviewed by walking away from the reporter.
from BuzzFeed - Breaking http://ift.tt/ZMRRm4
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