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Comment by giarc | Hacker News Reader

All hospitals can contain Ebola. This is not an airborne disease and therefore negative pressure isolation is not needed (unless performing aerosol generating procedures). All you need is a private room and proper PPE use and infection control procedures.

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Most modern / renovated hospitals (last ~10-15 years) have designed their isolation rooms to be negative pressure anyway and standard patient rooms also operate under negative pressure because of how airhandling is setup (albeit a very light negative pressure)

Perhaps the US is different(I work in IPC in Canada), but most isolation rooms are not negative pressure capable. It is very expensive to design a room to accommodate negative pressure (separate air handling, HEPA filtered exhaust, sealing the room to the true ceiling). Most isolation rooms are designed to handle contact isolation patients, and therefore no negative pressure is needed.

I'm mostly familiar with ER design so I may be off, as far as what "normal" rooms are like. But from my recollection there was a push after 9/11 to move any new isolation rooms to negative pressure and there were subsidies in place to encourage that. There was also a push to redo airhandling for standard rooms to approximate negative pressure but with less stringent scrubbing.

You could be correct, I'm not familiar with post 9/11 IPC planning in the States, however I highly doubt that all isolation rooms in the USA are negative pressure. I assume the post 9/11 push was for all hospitals in urban settings to have at least negative pressure isolation room (very different from an isolation room).

A private room? Lucky to get a bed in the hallway in some of these hospitals.

It may not be airborne but it's still highly infectious and you need proper facilities for that, a private room alone is not enough for that. A lot of hospitals, at least smaller ones, are unable to handle such diseases.

In any case containing a patient you know has ebola, is the least of the problems. Ebola symptoms are not exactly distinctive and if you don't have reason to suspect ebola, it may very well be able to spread before it can be contained.

A private room is indeed able to prevent the spread of Ebola.

From the CDC website.

Yes – any U.S. hospital that is following CDC's infection control recommendations and can isolate a patient in a private room‎ is capable of safely managing a patient with EVD. CDC recommends that U.S. hospitals isolate the patient in a private room and implement standard, contact, and droplet precautions.

Source: http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/hcp/patient-management-us-hospi...

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