Betsy McCaughey says that despite assurances from New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the city's hospitals are not prepared to deal with Ebola.
Appearing on "The Cats Roundtable" on New York's AM 970 on Sunday, McCaughey said Cuomo and de Blasio's promise that they are getting hospitals ready won't work because "this is not something you can do overnight."
New York’s hospitals "are not ready for Ebola," McCaughey said. "Hospitals that can’t stop staph and C. diff, and other common infections that are raging through their hallways, cannot control Ebola."
McCaughey chairs the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths and has spent the past decade trying to make hospital patients safer.
Two nurses who treated Thomas Eric Duncan in Dallas tested positive for Ebola, though both have since been released from the hospital. And New York City doctor Craig Spencer is in isolation in New York's Bellevue Hospital after working with Doctors Without Borders in West Africa, where the outbreak is severe.
McCaughey said those cases point out that the main worry is with healthcare workers catching the virus while treating ill patients rather than people catching it in the general public who may be around patients when they are not having symptoms and, therefore, not contagious.
A total of 236 doctors and nurses have died treating Ebola patients, primarily in West Africa, she said.
"Nurses are very worried," McCaughey said.
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