Feeling Ebola Anxiety, From Bellevue to Brooklyn

New York: Less than 24 hours after the first diagnosis of Ebola in New York City, worries about a public panic were giving way to a desire to restore order as quickly as possible.

While city officials were doing their best, through words and deeds, to allay fears, health officials and cleaning crews were rushing to reopen the businesses that Dr. Craig A. Spencer had patronized since his return last week from treating Ebola patients in Guinea. At the apartment building in Harlem where he lives with his fiancée, workers in protective suits removed personal items and placed them in big, blue barrels set on a gray tarpaulin in the hallway.

City Councilman Mark Levine, who represents that part of Harlem, said the crew was trying to make the apartment habitable by Friday night. He said a contractor hired by the city was removing all bodily fluids and disposing of sheets, towels and toothbrushes as if they were medical waste.

"It's a pretty involved process," Levine said in an interview. "Speaking optimistically, when Dr. Spencer gets better and/or if his fiancée chooses to come home, the goal would be that the apartment would be ready for someone to live in as soon as tonight."

A neighbor who lives across the hall from the couple, Ricqui Lawrence, 54, said the cleanup crew had told residents it was safe to stay in the building. But Lawrence said he had taken some precautions of his own: He cleaned the floor in the hallway with bleach, as well as the elevator buttons, Spencer's doorknob and his own doorknob.

"Beyond that," Lawrence said, "I'm not going to freak out about it. I was a germaphobe, so I'm still a germaphobe. That's not going to change."

But he added that at least one of his neighbors on the fifth floor had temporarily moved out of the building. "She has two small children," Lawrence said. "That's reasonable."

On Friday evening, Spencer remained in isolation on the seventh floor at Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan. His fiance, Morgan Dixon, and two of their friends were under quarantine, city health officials said.

Spencer's presence had some employees of the hospital worried, including a few nurses who tried to get out of working their scheduled shifts on the seventh floor, said Georgiana Ochilly, 59, a veteran nurse who cares for newborn babies there.

"We're wondering how Ebola is being spread. Is it airborne?" Ochilly said, revealing a lack of understanding that the virus can only be contracted through contact with bodily fluids of an infected person. "There is a lot of concern about it," she said, as she finished a 12-hour shift around 8:30 a.m.

Indeed, the governors of New York and New Jersey announced Friday afternoon that anybody who had had direct contact with Ebola patients in West Africa would be quarantined upon their arrival at Kennedy or Newark Liberty Airport.

But away from the hospital, most New Yorkers were sticking to their routines and looking forward to the weekend - even at places Spencer had visited before he fell ill. Health officials said Spencer traveled by subway to the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan on Tuesday and walked on the High Line elevated park. On Wednesday, they said, he went to the Gutter, a bowling alley in Brooklyn.

At the Blue Bottle Coffee stand on the High Line, where Spencer stopped on Tuesday, several people were queued up for coffees. An employee, who declined to identify himself, would say only that "We're all fine here."

At the Meatball Shop in Greenwich Village, where officials said Spencer ate on Tuesday, a sign on the door announced that the restaurant was closed for lunch. David Brand, 27, a social work student at New York University, said he could "see the headlines writing themselves already," given the spherical theme of the bowling alley and the meatball shop and the phonetic likeness of bowling and balls to Ebola.

"It's too bad for those businesses that it's become a circus," he said. "People don't have information, and that just exacerbates the problem and" - he pointed to the pack of reporters and cameras outside the Meatball Shop - "that doesn't help."

A spokesman for the restaurant said the health department had assured the owners that Spencer's visit posed no health risk, but just to be safe, it closed voluntarily "while it was cleaned and sanitized." The Meatball Shop intended to reopen for business Friday night.

Across the East River, the Gutter also had closed upon learning that Spencer had been there shortly before getting sick. Around midday Friday, a doctor from the city's health department, Don Weiss, stood with the Gutter's owner, Todd Powers, in front of the bowling alley's entrance to declare that "there is no risk of Ebola here."

"We came to see that there was no exposure - meaning there was no bodily fluids that were here. We confirmed that," Weiss said.

Powers said he would have the Gutter thoroughly cleaned and sanitized. "Once that's taken care of, we'll open the doors to the public and we hope the mayor and governor come down and bowl," he said. He did not specify when the Gutter would reopen.