A Yale student who was put in isolation at Yale New Haven Hospital tested negative for Ebola on Thursday. The Ebola scare put Connecticut on high alert for the virus.
The public health doctoral student had recently traveled to Liberia, and was admitted to the hospital after developing a low-grade fever. Late Thursday, the results came back from a lab in Massachusetts – it wasn’t Ebola. But the threat of a possible case led Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy to announce new steps to prepare the state for Ebola. Malloy established a command team to act as a central authority to deal with any Ebola cases in the state. And he said he wants to make sure Connecticut hospitals don’t make the same kind of mistakes that led two nurses to contract the virus while treating an Ebola patient in Dallas.
“That’s why I am directing every hospital in the state of Connecticut to conduct a drill within the next 7 days," said Malloy. "I would hope they’d do it within the next 48 hours.”
U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut praised the response of Yale and first responders to the possible case. But she warned a 44 percent cut to the hospital preparedness fund from the Department of Health and Human Services could impact the response in future cases.
“Some hospitals can absorb the costs, some hospitals can’t," DeLauro said. "So we need to be very very concerned about the resources that are being applied right now.”
Connecticut’s public health commissioner, Jewel Mullen, said on Thursday that all hospitals in the state have reported that they do have the inventory of equipment necessary to care for Ebola patients.
