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Bellevue Hospital to Be a Focus if Ebola Hits New York

New York’s premier public hospital will become a center for treatment of the Ebola virus in the city, hospital and city officials said on Tuesday, amid widespread concerns that the disease may not be so easily contained by every hospital that has an isolation unit.

Bellevue Hospital Center, the country’s oldest public hospital, would receive any confirmed Ebola cases within the 11-member public hospital system, a Bellevue spokesman said. It would also be available to receive transfers from private hospitals in the city.

City health officials said that the decision to transfer patients would be made by hospital officials in consultation with the health department case by case, and that not all patients would necessarily be transferred: A patient could, for instance, prefer to stay in a local hospital.

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Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan will be a center for Ebola treatment, officials said.Credit...Spencer Platt/Getty Images

The decision to make Bellevue, in Manhattan, available for transfers was greeted with relief by emergency room doctors who have been training their staff in how to detect and treat Ebola.

“It is a better development for the patient,” Dr. Ambreen Khalil, the assistant director of infectious disease at Staten Island University Hospital, said. The hospital has been preparing for the possibility of treating patients with ties to West Africa, where thousands have died from Ebola.

The New York decision came as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Monday that it was rethinking infection control measures since a nurse in Dallas became the first person known to have contracted Ebola in the United States.

Bellevue’s infectious disease ward has four single-bed rooms that would receive high-probability or confirmed Ebola cases, Ian Michaels, the Bellevue spokesman, said, and more rooms could be added.

The hospital has nine isolation units in its emergency department to handle suspected cases.

Bellevue is also setting up a separate laboratory in the infectious disease ward to handle Ebola blood samples, so they will not have to be transported around the hospital and to minimize the risk of contaminating equipment used in other testing.

New York City is capable of testing for Ebola and getting results within a few hours.

Although Bellevue will be a focal point, every hospital in the city will maintain at least one isolation room capable of handling Ebola patients, a spokeswoman for the health department said.

Doctors said the transportation of patients from other parts of the city to Bellevue could prove a challenge, because it increased the risk of exposure. But they noted that several Ebola patients had been flown to the United States from West Africa and treated at specially designated hospitals in Atlanta and Omaha, without incident.

So far, there have been no confirmed Ebola cases in New York City. As of early October, 88 patients had been suspected of having Ebola; just 11 met the C.D.C. criteria, but turned out to have diseases like malaria and typhoid, according to a report by the city’s health department, which was released on Tuesday in the C.D.C.’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

City health department officials said on Tuesday that Bellevue was well suited to the task because it had been managing an isolation unit for years. As previously announced, Bellevue will take care of patients who might come through the city’s airports.

In its C.D.C. report, the health department hinted at the psychological stress of taking care of Ebola patients. It said there might have been delays in diagnosing some cases in the city “because of hesitancy by health care providers to examine patients or by laboratory workers to handle specimens.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: Bellevue to Be Focus if Virus Hits New York. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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