HAGERSTOWN, Md. (AP) — Rep. John Delaney and Republican challenger Dan Bongino both criticized the government’s handling of the Ebola crisis Wednesday but split on whether flights into the United States from stricken countries should be immediately banned. Bongino said yes; Delaney said not yet.
“While I’m not directionally opposed to that, and it may be the right thing to do, I actually think the first step, and we’re doing it now, is intense, intense screening of all international flights,” the first-term congressman said during a tour of infection-prevention facilities at the Meritus Medical Center in Hagerstown, about 70 miles west of Baltimore.
Delaney spokesman Will McDonald said Delaney favors expanding screenings of passengers from West Africa to all U.S. airports of all international flights.
Bongino derided Delaney’s comment on a travel ban. The former Secret Service agent from Anne Arundel County said he called four weeks ago for a temporary ban on incoming flights from the three, Ebola-stricken West African countries.
“You have to come out and be clear and forthright, and say it’s time to give a very serious look to an incoming travel ban,” Bongino said in a telephone interview.
Delaney and Bongino both said the Centers for Disease Control could have done more to prevent the spread of the disease.
Delaney said he favors sending Ebola patients in the U.S. to hospitals with specialized isolation units. The CDC has identified four such hospitals: at Emory University in Atlanta; the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland; a hospital at the University of Nebraska in Omaha; and St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula, Montana.
Bongino said infectious patients should be moved as little as possible. He said they should be treated at Level 1 trauma centers. Most states are served by at least one such center, designated for the highest level of rapid, intensive care.
“We shouldn’t need to transport patients over wide distances,” Bongino said. “Transportation introduces variability and variability is what you do not want in the response to this disease.”
