Yale grad student who traveled to Liberia tests negative for Ebola after hospitalization Student tests negative after being hospitalized

NEW HAVEN >> A graduate student at Yale School of Public Health has tested negative for Ebola after being hospitalized with symptoms of the deadly virus Wednesday night at Yale-New Haven Hospital, but the sample is also to be tested by the CDC as a precaution.

The student, who returned from Liberia on Saturday, was being treated in isolation Thursday.

A specimen was sent to a lab in Boston, Massachusetts, and preliminary results were released at about 4:45 p.m.

Officials said the patient’s condition improved upon being admitted to the hospital.

“We have received preliminary notification that the patient admitted to Yale-New Haven Hospital late last night has tested negative for Ebola,” said Dr. Thomas Balcezak, the hospital’s chief medical officer, in a statement Thursday afternoon. “Due to an overabundance of caution, before we fully rule it out, we will wait for the CDC official confirmation of the test result. In the meantime we will continue to monitor the patient using all appropriate protocols and precautions in order to ensure the safety of our staff, patients and community.”

One of two School of Public Health researchers to return from Liberia after working there, the student has not been identified and officials have declined to provide any identifying information, including whether the student is a man or a woman. According to a source, the student does not have children.

The state Department of Public Health said all isolation protocols would remain in place pending the official results from the CDC.

“Certainly this is encouraging news,” said Gov. Dannel P. Malloy in a statement. “While the initial test results are negative, (DPH Commissioner) Dr. (Jewel) Mullen has made the determination that it is in the best interest for residents in New Haven and the surrounding area that the patient remain isolated as we await official test results from the CDC.”

Live coverage: Check here for updates about the possible Ebola patient

Dr. Thomas Balcezak, Chief Medical Officer for Yale-New Haven Hospital, answers questions during a press conference at the Yale School of Medicine concerning a patient who had visited Liberia showing a possible symptom of the Ebola virus on 10/16/2014. agold@newhavenregister.com Photo by Arnold Gold/New Haven Register less Dr. Thomas Balcezak, Chief Medical Officer for Yale-New Haven Hospital, answers questions during a press conference at the Yale School of Medicine concerning a patient who had visited Liberia showing a possible ... more Photo: Journal Register Co. Photo: Journal Register Co. Image 1 of / 42 Caption Close Yale grad student who traveled to Liberia tests negative for Ebola after hospitalization 1 / 42 Back to Gallery

Yale-New Haven Hospital and its outpatient services remain open and officials said the highest level of precautions are being taken.

“We think the admission of this patient went very smoothly,” Yale-New Haven Hospital President Richard D’Aquila said at a hastily-arranged press conference Thursday afternoon. “I can’t praise enough all of our staff, staff in virtually every single department that played a role” in the patient’s admission to the hospital.

At the press conference, officials said the student was admitted to the hospital with a low-grade fever and has improved since arriving at the hospital. The patient is in “good, stable condition,” hospital officials said.

The patient is being kept in isolation in a negative pressure room.

The student is one of two Yale graduate students who recently returned from Liberia, where they had been kept in isolation after working in the nation that is most heavily impacted by the deadly disease.

The students were not in direct contact with Ebola patients in Liberia, but officials said the student interacted with at least one person who was later diagnosed with Ebola.

The Yale Daily News, citing a source familiar with the student’s travel activities, reported that the student had direct contact with NBC cameraman Ashoka Mukpo the day before Mukpo developed symptoms.

Mukpo was diagnosed with Ebola on Oct. 1.

Later Thursday, New Haven Public School posted information about Ebola on its website to inform parents of the situation and to assure them that “There are no cases of Ebola in New Haven Public Schools.”

Malloy said he is convening a Unified Command Team, chaired by state Public Health Commissioner Jewel Mullen, to serve as the point person in the state’s ongoing emergency management efforts.

He said the team will be responsible for coordinating resources and personnel and act as the single point of communication with the public. Mullen’s group will also be responsible for that frontline personnel at hospitals and public safety first responders have been properly trained to deal with an Ebola case.

The governor said “pre-emptive action is the right approach.”

United Way’s 211 is providing information and links on its website at www.211ct.org.

Mullen said she had already planned to visit hospitals to see what they are doing.

Malloy confirmed that someone may be treated in isolation at Bridgeport Hospital but that person does not have Ebola.

The governor said if the case in New Haven had been confirmed as Ebola, a team would have been dispatched from the CDC and would have assisted in the supervision and evaluation.

Malloy said, through Mullen, he is directing “every hospital including its EMS staff in the state perform a drill within the next week to assure that their procedures are up to standard.”

A spokesman for the American Medical Response ambulance company, Ron Cunningham, said AMR was contacted to take a person to the hospital with possible symptoms of Ebola Wednesday night.

MORE: Ambulance official describes process of transporting possible Ebola patient

Cunningham said a “whole process kind of kicks into gear” after an event like that, regarding communication between the city and medical officers on the AMR side. To transport the patient, ambulance workers wore “full CDC suits” and wrapped the inside of the ambulance and went through all the procedures to decontaminate themselves and the vehicle after the transport was completed, he said.

City spokesman Laurence Grotheer said the student developed a low-grade fever Wednesday and contacted the Yale School of Public Health. As a cautionary measure, the student was taken to the hospital, he said.

Hospital officials said the patient was being monitored by a primary care physician and contacted that physician after developing the fever. The hospital prepared for the patient’s arrival and followed procedures it has been practicing for weeks.

Grotheer said the students voluntarily sequestered themselves after returning from Liberia. The second student was being monitored for symptoms Thursday.

Grotheer said he didn’t know whether the student had contact with anyone after returning, but authorities are looking into that.

Officials said the state health department and other authorities will be contacting people the patient may have contacted during the time since his return from Liberia.

New Haven Mayor Toni Harp said she was notified about the patient Wednesday. Police, fire and other emergency officials coordinated the transportation of the patient to the hospital at about 9 p.m.

“We feel we were well-prepared to handle an event like this,” D’Aquila said. “We’ve been preparing to handle an event like this for weeks.”

Hospital officials said they could not identify the student, citing federal patient privacy laws.

Balcezak, Y-NH’s chief medical officer, said the graduate student in isolation has a team of four people — two physicians and two nurses — involved in the patient’s care around the clock. But it will not be same four people all the time; they will be replaced in shifts. Balcezak did not know exactly how many people in total would be involved with treating the student, although he said the hospital is trying to keep that number low.

At the press conference, Yale School of Medicine President Robert J. Alpern said the school would not ban people from traveling to West Africa on behalf of Yale, but he said the bar for such trips to be approved would be “very high.”

Malloy said Connecticut is going beyond what the CDC is recommending.

“I want everyone to know — from the nurses in our emergency rooms to our first responders and our law enforcement personnel — we will provide whatever resources we have at our disposal so that you can do your critically important jobs safely and effectively,” he said at a press in Hartford.

Malloy recently signed an order allowing the commissioner of health to order a quarantine, if necessary.

The governor told residents if they become sick with a fever and/or have nausea, vomiting and diarrhea and they have traveled to Liberia, Sierra Leone or Guinea in the last 21 days or have had contact with a person who has had Ebola, they should go to the hospital.

Persons who are sick will be put into isolation.

Those who are not sick, but have been in contact with sick individuals or traveled to affected areas, will be required to stay home for 21 days and take their temperature twice a day.

Public health officials will contact them twice a day for an update.

Malloy, at his press conference at the Emergency Operation Center in Hartford, said Yale University is cooperating as Y-NH and the state quarantine and isolate others who were with the public health student who may have Ebola.

Mullen said earlier this month she asked each hospital to complete a checklist on its preparedness for Ebola. She said all acute care hospitals had done so.

Malloy and Mullen tried to put the disease in perspective, reiterating that it cannot be transmitted through water, food or the air.

It is spread through blood or the bodily fluids of a sick person or someone who has died from it.

It’s also possible to contract it from contaminated objects, such as needles or from touching infected animals, their blood or other bodily fluids or their meat.

The governor’s office was made aware of the potential case of Ebola Wednesday evening.

Yale President Peter Salovey said the decision to hospitalize the student was “made out of an abundance of caution” on the recommendation of the student’s doctors, local and state health officials and the CDC.

“I understand that this situation may be worrying to some of you, to your families and friends, and to members of the Yale and New Haven communities,” Salovey said in an email to the university community. “The health and safety of our interconnected communities is always our highest priority. The doctoral students who visited Liberia are knowledgeable about public health.

“They have reported that they were not in contact with Ebola patients or caregivers in Liberia, that they carefully followed recommended travel and hygiene precautions during their stay in the country and that they have continued to do so since their return. In addition, I know our colleagues at Yale-New Haven Hospital are well prepared to address this situation, however it develops, with compassion and skill,” Salovey wrote.

The students originally had volunteered to stay away from work for 21 days, the maximum time for the virus incubation. Yale University School of Public Health Dean Paul D. Cleary wrote in an email Monday that a “university-wide team of physicians, epidemiologists and senior administrators concluded that a 21-day sequestration was unnecessary.”

Cleary noted that when the students left for Liberia the school “knew they would not be in contact with Ebola-infected patients or health care providers.”

The students were in Liberia to work with health officials on computer disease tracking systems.

The students arrived Sept. 16 in Liberia, according to the Yale Daily News. They were originally scheduled to return Oct. 4 but instead stayed in Liberia in isolation until Saturday.

“I feel that I should directly address the question of why our Public Health students — or why anyone affiliated with Yale — would even consider traveling to these dangerous parts of the world,” Salovey said in his email. “As an academic institution with a research and teaching mission and a long tradition of service, it is important for our clinicians and investigators to be able to go where they can put their training and expertise to the highest, best use.

“Some members of our community with special expertise may be called on to engage directly in order to advance knowledge and understanding, to treat the sick, or to tend to those who are displaced or suffering,” Salovey said. “If they do, I hope we will all offer gratitude and support, just as we do now for our hospitalized student.”

Officials at the hospital discussed plans for how a patient showing symptoms of Ebola would be handled earlier this week.

The hospital said it would use extra protection, including a respirator mask rather than a standard face mask. But first, dressing for such an emergency starts with Tyvek fabric boots over the shoes, a gown like an apron with sleeves and with loops over the thumbs, a second full-body suit, two pairs of gloves, hair bonnet, face mask and plastic screen over the face.

“There’s a certain process you have to go through to do this,” Donald MacMillan, a physician’s assistant who is Yale-New Haven’s emergency management coordinator, said as he demonstrated donning the gear. “You have to do it in the right order.”

The hospital staff suits up in pairs, “to make sure I don’t violate any protocols we have in place” and to make sure there are no tears in the fluid-impermeable fabric, MacMillan said.

“It’s not designed to be totally skin-covered,” MacMillan said. “It’s so our mucous membranes are protected from the splashing.” Ebola is spread by body fluids such as blood, diarrhea and vomit.

If putting on the protective clothing is tedious, “taking it off is the more difficult scenario,” said D’Onofrio. The health care worker removes the gear “piece by piece, the most contaminated to the less contaminated,” she said, washing hands after each step.

Yale-New Haven has nearly 5,000 sets on hand, calculated at 50 per staff member per day.

In the Emergency Department, the patient is taken to a room with negative air pressure, meaning the air is drawn out through filters. Specimens are not brought to the lab. Instead, special lab equipment is brought to the bedside.

There have been three diagnosed cases of Ebola in the U.S., along with several scares where patients tested negative for Ebola after showing symptoms of the virus.

The first confirmed case of Ebola in the U.S. was diagnosed on Sept. 30. Thomas Eric Duncan was treated at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. He died Oct. 8.

Two nurses that treated Duncan were later diagnosed with the virus. One of the nurses, Amber Vinson, traveled by plane from Dallas to Ohio shortly before being diagnosed. She is now being treated at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.

President Barack Obama postponed a political trip to Connecticut on Wednesday to hold a cabinet meeting to discuss the government’s response to Ebola. Obama was scheduled to attend a rally for Malloy’s re-election campaign in Bridgeport.

Obama vowed Wednesday that his administration would respond in a “much more aggressive way” to cases of Ebola in the United States and warned that in an age of frequent travel the disease could spread globally if the world doesn’t respond to the “raging epidemic in West Africa.”

In his most urgent comments on the spread of the disease, Obama also sought to ease growing anxiety and fears in the U.S. in the aftermath of a second nurse being diagnosed with Ebola after treating a patient in a Dallas hospital. He said he had directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to step up its response to new cases.

“We want a rapid response team, a SWAT team essentially, from the CDC to be on the ground as quickly as possible, hopefully within 24 hours, so that they are taking the local hospital step by step though what needs to be done,” he said.

The death toll has climbed above 4,500 in Africa, all but a few within Liberia, Sierra Leone and New Guinea, the World Health Organization said.

To this point, only hospital workers—a Madrid nursing assistant and the two nurses in Dallas—had been known to have contracted Ebola outside West Africa during the outbreak that began in March.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Check back for more information as it is made available.