Amber Ray Vinson, Nurse Stricken With Ebola, To Be Released From Hospital

Amber Ray Vinson, the second nurse to have been infected while treating Thomas Eric Duncan in a Dallas hospital, will be released from the hospital today:

DALLAS – Amber Vinson, one of two Texas nurses to contract Ebola while treating Thomas Eric Duncan, will be released Tuesday from Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, officials said.

Vinson, 29, was admitted to the hospital’s Serious Communicable Disease Unit on Oct. 15 and was declared free of the deadly virus last week.

She is expected to make her first public statement during a national news conference at 1 p.m. E.T., according to the hospital.

Vinson was diagnosed with the virus late on Oct. 14. A day later, the Dallas resident was flown by air ambulance to Atlanta for treatment at Emory, which has a specialized unit trained in treating Ebola.

“Amber is steadily regaining her strength and her spirits are high,” her family said in a statement last week. “We appreciate everyone for keeping Amber in your thoughts and prayers.”

Vinson’s diagnosis prompted Ebola worries from Dallas to Cleveland, when it was revealed that she had flown commercially in the days before being hospitalized. Her family fended off critics by pointing that health officials had approved her travel plans.

Vinson and her colleague, Nina Pham, were among 50 to 70 health care workers involved in the treatment of Liberian citizen Thomas Eric Duncan at Texas Health Presbyterian in Dallas from Sept. 28 to Oct. 8.

Vinson is now the latest in a series of Ebola patients who have been successfully treated in the United States that stretches back to the two doctors who were flown to Emory University in Atlanta this summer and now going all the way through Mr. Duncan, Ms. Pham, Ms. Vinson, and Dr. Craig Sinclair. Of those, only one has passed away and that seems to be due in no small part that he wasn’t admitted to the hospital until his symptoms had become far more severe than just a fever. The remainder have all been admitted almost immediately upon exhibiting that first symptom of an initial fever, and all of those have been successfully treated with the exception of Dr. Craig Sinclair who remains under treatment at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. There haven’t been a lot details released about Dr. Sinclair’s condition, but what has been made public seems to suggest that his treatment is following the same course as Pham and Vinson. If that’s the case, then he likely will be cured as well.

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Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. JohnMcC says:

    Small thing but I obsess about such stuff: It’s Dr Craig Spencer.

  2. Grewgills says:

    So we see that all of those (not you) who were fear mongering 70-90% mortality rates everywhere were dead wrong and even those (me) who talked about 25% mortality rates in first world medical scenarios were wrong. This is good news.