Laura Collins, Senior Reporter for MailOnline, who was treated at the same hospital as Thomas Eric Duncan after she felt ill following interviews with individuals who came into direct contact with Duncan, said that it was “quite patently” untrue that officials were on top of the situation and that “a lot” of the allegations of nurses were backed up by what she witnessed on Friday’s “Kelly File” on the Fox News Channel.
Collins reported that “there was an absence of complete certainty as far as what people should and shouldn’t be doing,” and that after she showed up and explained her situation, the nurse she spoke to “immediately handed me a mask, put a mask on herself, and started making phone calls to try to establish what to do next.” And that “when I was ushered into an isolation room and essentially sat there while they worked on quite what to do next, I could hear the nurses outside discussing what they needed to do in terms of the order they should put their protective clothing on, and how they should take it off.”
She added, “it just seemed very uncertain. There was no clear instruction, and a lot of the complaints that have been coming out from nurses that they were using tape to seal things, that they felt unclear in what they should be doing, [fit] completely what I witnessed.”
She declared that assertions from the CDC and hospital officials that the situation was under control “quite patently wasn’t true.”
According to Collins, one of the nurses who treated her, “was fumbling because she wasn’t used to wearing three layers of protective clothing. She then proceeded to take all those layers off while still in the room with me before leaving it, and before it had been established how much of a risk, if indeed I was a risk, I was.”
She concluded “I left confident that I was fine, but far from confident that the situation was contained because they just weren’t clear about the protocols to the point where it seemed there weren’t really clear protocols.” And “the nurses themselves, I think, are struggling themselves with shifting protocols, and frankly there should not have been a situation where the people who were seeing to me were doing it for the first time. This wasn’t something they had practiced.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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