From the AP, a supposed timeline of the chain of events starting when the deceased first showed up at the hospital.
Not 55 hours earlier, Duncan had been at the hospital complaining of a headache and abdominal pain. His temperature spiked to 103 at one point, and on a scale of one to 10, he rated his pain as an eight.
Doctors ran tests, decided it must be sinusitis, sent him home with antibiotics and told him to follow up with a doctor the next day.
I'm not yet a medical professional, but it's my understanding that one generally doesn't get admitted just for having a high fever until your temperature reaches the 106° mark in the absence of other symptoms.
A nurse's note said Duncan told her he recently had arrived from Africa. That information did not make it to the attending physician.
I understand that a lot of Americans are what I charitably call geographically retarded, but I like to think that a nurse working in an ED somewhere would at least have the sense to know that Africa was a continent, not a country like a lot of kids have demonstrated on Twitter in the recent past. That being said, Africa is a big fucking continent, and ebola is not spread throughout the entire land; it's just in those three countries for now. It doesn't require a suspension of disbelief to think that the nurse was ignorant enough of current events to not have thought to ask what part of Africa did he travel from. Duncan's generalization is just as much to blame, in this instance, as this nurse's ignorance.
As far as why that information didn't make it to the attending (who may have connected the dots sooner), I don't know. The article doesn't exactly give me enough information to formulate a guess as to why that might be. I've heard guesses, and then heard those guesses get walked back, so I'm not going to add my two bits on that.
I seriously wonder if the deceased had medical insurance and if that was a consideration to send him home vice admission when he visited hospital the first time.
Let's get down to brass tacks with this one.
According to the Centers for Medicare/Medicaid Service (CMS), section 1867 of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), enacted in 1986,
states that "In the case of a hospital that has a hospital emergency department, if any individual (whether or not eligible for benefits under this title) comes to the emergency department and a request is made on the individual's behalf for examination or treatment for a medical condition, the hospital must provide for an appropriate medical screening examination within the capability of the hospital's emergency department, including ancillary services routinely available to the emergency department, to determine wheter or not an emergency medical condition (within the meaning of subsection (e)(1) exists." This applies to anyone regardless of citizenship, legal status, or ability to pay.
Since the EMTALA applies
ONLY to hospitals that accept Medicaid or Medicare, and damn near every hospital in American accepts Medicare, the blanket statement that "all hospitals are required to provide stabilizing treatment, or provide transfer to a hospital that can better provide stabilizing treatment if the original hospital is unable to provide those services (and the receiving hospital has the space, qualified personnel, and agrees to accept the patient)" is acceptable. That means there's a small, itty bitty teensie weensie chance that idiot Duncan chose the one hospital in all of Texas that falls outside of that law because they don't accept Medicare or Medicaid patients. If that's the case, then that's the kind of schadenfreude that legends are born from, but that's highly unlikely.
Simply based on what I've been able to glean from open sources (read: mainstream news), it looks to me more like a botched diagnosis and a comedy of errors rather than discrimination against the poverty stricken foreigners among us. Malpractice perhaps, but not racism. Besides, who's to say that the nurse didn't want to seem racist by automatically assuming that just because the black guy came from Africa (Duncan's generalization during his first visit to the ED) that he automatically has ebola.
. I need a full body glove and a vat of purell!
