Dallas Nurse Amber Ray Vinson Reportedly Free Of Ebola

Amber Ray Vinson, the second nurse who treated Timothy Eric Duncan to become infected with the Ebola virus is reportedly already free of the virus:

Dallas nurse Amber Vinson no longer has signs of Ebola in her blood, her family said Wednesday, one week after she was hospitalized at an Atlanta hospital with the potentially deadly virus.

Vinson will be transferred into a different unit at Emory University Hospital and is still being treated in the serious communicable diseases unit, the family said.

“Amber and our family are ecstatic to receive this latest report on her condition,” her mother Debra Barry said, saying the news had “truly answered prayers and bring our family one step closer to reuniting with her at home.”

There hasn’t been any confirmation of this from the doctors treating Vinson but, if it is confirmed, it is certainly tremendously good news and yet another indication of how well we are able to deal with the disease when it is diagnosed early and properly diagnosed. In other good news, Nina Pham, the first nurse to become infected in Dallas, continues to improve herself and her dog, who had become the focus of some media attention after she fell ill, has been determined to be Ebola free. This became something of an issue after Spanish authorities had decided to euthanize the dog owned by a nurse in that country who had become infected with Ebola despite the fact that there was no evidence that the disease could be transmitted from humans to dogs, or that dogs could be carriers of the disease without showing symptoms.

If this good news continues, it would appear that the first “Ebola crisis” in the United States will be over by early November.

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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. C. Clavin says:

    This cannot be true….because last week the bed-wetters said we were all going to die due to Gubmint incompetence.
    1 dead hardly makes for the worst epidemic in history.
    I’ll just wait for them all to admit how stupid they were being.

  2. stonetools says:

    @C. Clavin:

    Heh, don’t hold your breath. THE biggest problem in our public discourse, IMO, is that pundits aren’t penalized for being wrong. Thus wrong conclusions and even outright lies go uncorrected, and indeed are endlessly repeated and are accepted as true by the faithful.
    Thus conservatives take it as gospel that Obamacare is a “disaster” and that ebola is “spreading” due to Obama’s incompetence and the “fact” that the CDC was distracted by studies on “fat lesbians”. This would be something to be laughed at except that the conservative faithful are poised to vote in a Republican majority partly based on these zombie lies. Frankly, all of this is a problem for the marketplace of ideas ideal where bad ideas lose out to good ideas through open discussion. Seems to me bad ideas are in fact winning out through relentless reptition. Anyway, that’s for a different thread I guess.

  3. michael reynolds says:

    @stonetools:

    I agree. For example, OTB has yet to begin to address the utter wrongness of their earlier positions on Obamacare.

  4. C. Clavin says:

    @stonetools:

    Seems to me bad ideas are in fact winning out through relentless reptition.

    I think that’s part of it…I’m a big proponent limiting the soapbox of people with track records of being totally wrong…but another key part is simply lying by omission.
    It has occured to me recently that people like Jenos and JKB and Florack and Guanari and Jack and John425 and bill and the others aren’t willfully ignoring the facts…it’s simply that the media outlets they trust to tell them things aren’t telling them all the facts. FOX news is not covering the success of Obamacare…so to those guys Obamacare is a failure. Hotair is not covering the successes of the CDC…so to those guys the CDC is incompetent. Breitbart is not covering the deportations and the tiny trickle of immigrants…so to those guys the borders are wide f’ing open.
    I just saw a stat that said nearly 50% of Republicans get their news from FOX News…which is well documented to mis-inform it’s viewers. When one half of the political process is mis-informed then bad ideas are bound to, not only exist, but thrive.

  5. gVOR08 says:

    @stonetools: True. And it’s fun to see Krugman’s phrase “zombie lie” entering every day usage. I just wish there weren’t so many occasions to use it.

  6. gVOR08 says:

    IIRC there were four medical people brought home from Africa with Ebola, one journalist, the late Mr. Duncan, and the two nurses; and everyone except Mr. Duncan is now free of it. That makes the mortality rate in the US 12%. And that only because Mr. Duncan entered treatment late.

  7. stonetools says:

    @C. Clavin:

    It has occured to me recently that people like Jenos and JKB and Florack and Guanari and Jack and John425 and bill and the others aren’t willfully ignoring the facts…it’s simply that the media outlets they trust to tell them things aren’t telling them all the facts.

    No, I think there’s an element of wilfulness here. We all like our prejudices confirmed and hate to have our beliefs challenged, and so they choose media outlets that make them comfortable.
    I think Doug is also an example here as well. As a libertarian he hates to admit he was wrong on Obamacare, since it challenges a big chunk of his ideology on government, so he simply ignores inconvenient facts about its success. I think he is slowly coming around the idea that “voter ID” laws are not harmless attempts to assure voting integrity, but are deliberate attempts to supress minority voting, but he is resisting a conclusion that seems so clear to us liberals, because he doesn’t want to admit that his “team” is perpetuating racial bigotry.
    The bigger problem here is that the mainstream media just will not call out the lies and the wrong statements, because they are afraid of being seen as “unfair”. The right has really “worked the refs” here, to the stage where right wingers can just go on TV and flat out lie their a$$es off repeatedly, and know that the media simply will not correct them.(Indeed the right wing portion of the media positively encourages them to repeat their wrong statements).
    I think this situation is rising to the stage of being a “clear and present” danger to our democracy. The media has given one side a license to lie, really, and that cannot be good for democracy.I don’t want to go all Godwin here but we do have an example of a right wing party rising to electoral power on the basis of repeatedly lying about history and stigmatizing one particular group…

  8. gVOR08 says:

    @stonetools: A lot of blindingly obvious parallels go unmentioned out of courtesy and in deference to Godwin’s law. But it’s our friends on the other side who bitch about political correctness, oblivious to how much they benefit from it.

  9. Gustopher says:

    If this good news continues, it would appear that the first “Ebola crisis” in the United States will be over by early November.

    Conveniently, just in time for the mid-term elections. Are we sure this ebola came from Liberia and not Kenya? Why haven’t we seen the long form plane tickets of the first patient?

  10. MikeSJ says:

    It’s good news for the people infected of course but I was planning on making a killing in Depends stock.

    I figured with the huge spike in bedwetting and pants sh*tting going on in America their sales had to have gone through the roof.

  11. grumpy realist says:

    Oh good grief….

    Can we say something about the cluelessness of a doctor, just arrived from West Africa, having a recent history of treating Ebola patients, deciding to go out by Luft-taxi (i.e., how trackable is this?) to go bowling?

    Expect next round of panic….

    Maybe it would be a little smarter for people who were exposed to Ebola patients at their most infective to voluntarily quarantine themselves, just to make sure stuff like this doesn’t happen?

  12. lounsbury says:

    @grumpy realist: What is clueless? Until he is symptomatic, there is zero transmission risk. Clueless is your comment really. Why should thousands of non-symptomatic and perfectly healthy people quarantine themselves? Merely to guard against ignorant fear-mongering?