DALLAS — If there was a physical landmark of this city’s five-week Ebola scare it was Apartment 614.

In this second-story unit in the Ivy Apartments, behind a dull-gray door, the man whom city officials had taken to calling Patient Zero — Thomas Eric Duncan, 42, the first person to die of Ebola in the United States — briefly stayed. The apartment was gutted and decontaminated, at a cost to Dallas County of about a quarter of a million dollars.

On Friday, a bare room was visible behind the balcony’s smudged sliding glass doors. Even the carpet was ripped out, leaving a concrete floor with a plastic fork, a $13.99 price tag for lingerie and little else. A woman from Malaysia who lives next door said in broken English that she felt safe. Another neighbor, Biak Bualhring, 24, from Burma, walked below the empty apartment and hardly glanced up.