For months in the summer of 2014, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had warned the country’s health-care community that an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Western Africa could make its way here. The feds assured the public that America’s modern medical resources and infrastructure could avert a crisis. We were told hospitals had prepared and trained their staffs, using CDC guidelines, to address a virus they had never seen. Yet in late September, when a Liberian man named Thomas Eric Duncan walked into a Dallas emergency room with fever, headache and abdominal pains, his doctor and nurses found him unremarkable — just another of the night’s many victims of mishap and contagion. He was sent away after a few hours with antibiotics. None of the caregivers realized the encounter would soon become part of U.S. medical history. Duncan returned to the ER in an ambulance days later, far sicker than before. Tests soon revealed his true condition was Ebola, the first diagnosis of the virus on American soil. It triggered a national health scare that worsened when two of his nurses were stricken. In first announcing the diagnosis Sept. 30, officials at Dallas’ Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital had extolled their readiness. They told a room of reporters the hospital staff had been “meeting literally for weeks in anticipation of such an event.” But clues began appearing in subsequent days that Presbyterian, and perhaps others, had bungled the response. Officials acknowledged they had previously treated and released Duncan, and that a nurse indeed knew he had come from an Ebola-afflicted nation. Officials also issued other shifting, incomplete explanations for the misdiagnosis. Because of these questions about the Ebola response and misdiagnosis, the newspaper’s editors mobilized investigative and enterprise reporters to work on the rolling Ebola investigation. This series identified problems at Presbyterian’s ER, failures by government agencies in Dallas and beyond, and unearthed the grim reality that the U.S. had not benefitted from all of the lessons learned in Africa’s Ebola outbreaks. Among the findings: * Presbyterian had ER wait times twice as long as state and national averages, and been penalized by the federal government for patient readmissions. That suggested, experts said, the ER could have been operating understaffed or with an inefficient system for handling patients, setting the stage for someone like Duncan to slip through. * State and local officials waited more than two days to test Duncan’s blood, in apparent violation of federal guidelines. That delay meant health officials were slowed in identifying and isolating others who may have been exposed. * Days after Duncan’s Ebola diagnosis, the hospital faulted its electronic health records systems for keeping his physician from discovering his travel in an Ebola-afflicted country. The News found that similar systems have been repeatedly cited for delays in treatment, dosage mistakes and failures to detect fatal illnesses across the nation. * Weeks after the first Ebola diagnosis, The News found that the Dallas County health department’s guidelines for screening possible Ebola patients still had a hole that could let others like Duncan go undetected. By contrast, federal guidelines called for more scrutiny during screenings. * Despite government assurances that the U.S. health system was equipped to handle Ebola, The News documented similarities between m
