Craig Spencer was rushed to Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital in New York City. New York says it's ready for Ebola

Just as the risk of Ebola was receding in Dallas, a 33-year-old New York physician was diagnosed with the lethal virus on Thursday, creating a new test for public health readiness after the devastating missteps in Texas.

The physician, identified as Craig Spencer, had been working in West Africa with Doctors Without Borders, a relief agency with a strong but not perfect record of preventing the infection of its medical staff and volunteers. He arrived back in the U.S. on Oct. 17, symptom-free.


New York, which endured 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy and knows bad things can happen, said it was ready.

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The patient was transported by a hazmat team, not a random ambulance crew. They took him to Bellevue, one of eight New York state hospitals designated to treat Ebola patients. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention response team is en route.

“We are as ready as one could be for this circumstance,” said Gov. Andrew Cuomo at a televised press conference. “What happened in Dallas was actually the exact opposite.”

“We had the advantage of learning from the Dallas experience,” he added, more diplomatically.

The case is likely to raise sharp questions — already injected into the campaign season — about relying on people who have been in the affected parts of West Africa to self-isolate and monitor themselves when they return. This doctor, before he developed a fever, did take the subway, did go for a jog, did go to a bowling alley, did see friends. He had not been working at his hospital though while his three-week monitoring clock ticked.

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The public gets jittery when it hears about subways and bowling alleys. New York City health authorities, however, said only three people had close enough contact to Spencer to be at risk — his girlfriend and two friends. They will be quarantined, perhaps in their own home. A fourth person, who drove Spencer, had less contact and will be monitored but not quarantined.

Ebola did not spread in the community in Dallas; even people who had close contact for several days with the first patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, did not fall ill. The two nurses who did contract Ebola both had contact with his bodily fluids at the peak of Duncan’s sickness.

But public fear is widespread. The message from the Dallas experience that the virus is not easily spread is not always getting through. Containing panic will be challenging in New York.

Mayor Bill de Blasio went on television to try to do just that.

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“There is no reason for New Yorkers to be alarmed,” he said. “New Yorkers who have not been exposed to an infected person’s bodily fluids are not at all at risk.

“Being on the same subway car or living near a person with Ebola does not put someone at risk,” he said.

President Barack Obama spoke with De Blasio and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo Thursday night, according to a White House readout.

As the outbreak spread in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, the chances that a case would reach the United States or another nation in this interconnected world grew. The CDC and other public health officials began reaching out to hospitals and health care workers to prepare them for Ebola.

That didn’t help Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. It didn’t recognize an Ebola case initially and sent Duncan back into the community. When he returned and was hospitalized, two nurses involved in the early phases of his care got the virus.

There has been ample finger-pointing since then — about how much of the problem was CDC hubris in the face of a complex virus, how much was flawed preparation and how much was the CDC’s misplaced faith in hospitals’ competence. No one will ever know if another hospital, faced with the same circumstances, would have done a better job than the beleaguered Dallas institution.

The CDC had earlier maintained that any hospital could treat an Ebola patient. That is no longer the conventional wisdom. Patients will be transferred to specialized centers, like Bellevue, that are better-equipped to treat the virus and where health care workers know more about how to protect themselves. The coming days will test their preparation.

But if there is yet another case, arriving somewhere in the United States, it may not be a physician in a well-prepared city. A local hospital could still have to recognize Ebola, isolate the patient and protect its health care workers before transfer to a more specialized hospital can take place.

All the false alarms — while nerve-wracking and adding to the public’s erroneous sense that the risk is everywhere — have raised the awareness of local hospitals across the country. All sorts of people have been isolated and watched with “suspected” Ebola, only to find that they have an ordinary flu, or perhaps malaria.

But it takes only one mistake to spread the virus, as the nation learned from the nurses in Dallas.

The missionaries and health care workers who have been treated in the U.S. have survived or are still in treatment; Duncan, who did not get prompt care because of the initial misdiagnosis, is the only one who has died.

Spencer may have thought he was low-risk partly because Doctors Without Borders has a good record. Few of its international volunteers have become sick.

Sarah Wheaton, Marty Kady and Brett Norman contributed to this report.