Neighborhood on Edge as Ebola Brings Worry to Dallas Doorsteps

Dallas: Carleen and Ed Guerrero were asleep when two police officers rapped on their door at 5 a.m. Sunday to tell them that the Ebola virus had come to their leafy neighborhood just north of downtown.

One of their neighbors, a nurse from the beige-brick apartment building just down the street, had tested positive for Ebola, and hazardous-materials crews were cleaning her building, officials told the couple. It was, to say the least, unsettling news. For the past week, Ed Guerrero had fielded worried phone calls from far-flung relatives, but reassured them that Dallas was a sprawling city of 1.2 million people and that he and his wife did not have the slightest connection to the disease. The couple said they were still not worried about their health or safety, but said they no longer felt so distant from the virus that has dominated the news here. "It's so close to home," Carleen Guerrero said.

On Sunday, for the second time in two weeks, Ebola transformed part of this city into a scene of concern and contamination. A biohazard barrel sat outside the apartment building where hazardous-materials crews had spent the morning. Police officers stood guard on the streets. The mayor paid a visit. Neighbors woke to Ebola-information pamphlets from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on their doorsteps, and to another day of uneasy questions, this time about how a hospital worker who treated the Liberian man who died last week of Ebola could have been infected despite wearing protective gloves, a gown and mask.

"We're waiting and seeing what's going to happen next," said Jennifer Staubach Gates, a City Council member whose district includes the apartment complex where the Liberian victim, Thomas Eric Duncan, had been visiting his fiancée when he fell ill and first went to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital on Sept. 25. "It's just another level of this crisis that we're having to deal with now."

Texas Health Presbyterian, which treated Duncan and is now caring for the nurse, on Sunday announced it was prohibiting ambulances from bringing in new, non-Ebola cases. The hospital said it was taking the step because of limited staff capacity.

Across Dallas, people still crowded coffee shops and brunch spots, farmers markets and the State Fair on Sunday, but after public officials appeared on live television Sunday morning to announce this city's second Ebola case, concerns about Ebola and the response to it were never far from people's minds.

And in Dallas' M Streets neighborhood, a quiet residential area of brick Tudor homes and restaurants, those worries had come to their front doors.

As they walked their dogs and wandered outside in pajamas, most residents on Sunday said they were rattled but not overly concerned about the case in their neighborhood. One woman said she was considering heading to her mother's house for the night. Another woman, Heather Davis, who had been jogging to the gym, stopped at the scene and called her boyfriend, suddenly concerned about whether the nurse could have gone to her gym and used the same equipment. "It's now traveled to within three blocks of me," Davis said.

But Terry Pulling, who said she had been a nurse in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, said that fear and paranoia spread much easier than the virus itself.

"You're just not going to breathe it in," she said.

None of the neighbors said they knew the woman who had been infected, and officials did not identify her, saying that her family had asked for privacy. But even people who had never walked down the block on Marquita Avenue said the realization of the disease's proximity to their homes had changed how they viewed the disease.

"I was freaked out," said Michelle McCoy, 23, who lives a few streets down and stopped along the tree-lined street Sunday afternoon to look at the clusters of police cars and phalanx of television cameras aimed at the building. "It really brings it home."
Her friend, Nicole Broome, 24, a dietitian at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, said Duncan's case had made health care workers across the city more vigilant, and she doubted the disease had the potential to spread here. Still, she said she felt a tremor of uneasiness when treating a patient who was feverish or nauseated, and said the hospital worker's infection at Presbyterian showed the limits of gloves, masks and other measures to guard against Ebola.

"It could be anything," she said. "It could be as simple as what piece of clothing you removed first."

Neither of the women knew the hospital worker who is being treated in isolation for Ebola, but they said they admired her. "She stepped up to take care of this patient," McCoy said. "Everyone else wants to run away. I guess we should just pray for her."