Sheriff’s Deputy Who Was Sent to Ebola Victim’s Apartment On Route to Hospital…with Ebola Symptoms

Lily Dane | Lily Dane

Published on October 8, 2014

8 Comments

Remember when Thomas Duncan‘s family was forced to stay in their Ebola-contaminated apartment for several days?

They were forced into quarantine by Dallas County Sheriff’s officers.

Some of those officers actually ENTERED the apartment.

On October 2, WFAA reported:

Five members of the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department who were briefly inside the apartment where a man with Ebola stayed have been temporarily put on leave.‎

The three deputies, a sergeant, and a lieutenant accompanied the head of Dallas County Health and Human Services Department and a doctor into the apartment late Wednesday night. They had gone there on the orders of Sheriff Lupe Valdez to get the people inside to sign a court order forbidding them from leaving the apartment.

Then, this afternoon, this was reported:

Crews transported a patient exhibiting “signs and symptoms of Ebola” from a Frisco CareNow to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas.

Hmm…I wonder who that might be?

The patient was identified as Sgt. Michael Monnig, a deputy who accompanied county health officials Zachary Thompson and Christopher Perkins into the apartment where Thomas Eric Duncan stayed in Dallas.

This is particularly alarming:

The deputy was ordered to go inside the unit with officials to get a quarantine order signed. No one who went inside the unit that day wore protective gear.

It will take 48 hours for Monnig’s Ebola test results to come back.

Oh, and now two others are reportedly being observed too, for their possible exposure at the clinic:

Chuck Moreno, who went into the CareNow center with his 15-year-old son to get a flu shot, said he saw a patient whose skin was flushed enter the clinic with his wife. He was hunched over but walking.

Within minutes, police and fire units were there. Moreno said he asked a CareNow employee if the response was related to Ebola, and the employee nodded her head “yes.”

Moreno said he and his son went into an examination room, put on surgical masks they found there and sprayed disinfectant on themselves. Staff told them he and his son could not leave CareNow and would be transferred to a major medical center. (source)

Dallas County Sheriff’s Association President Christopher Dyer has repeatedly said that he did not believe that deputies should have been sent inside the quarantined apartment:

“This is a federal issue. The CDC should have come in and taken care of this. A local department is not equipped to deal with a virus that is potentially this deadly.”