President Obama on Monday said that federal officials would heighten screening of travelers coming to the United States, responding to growing calls to do more to limit the spread of the Ebola virus, but not meeting demands to put in place a travel ban from West Africa.
Following a meeting with members of his national security and public health teams, the president said his administration would put in place “protocols to do additional passenger screening both at the source and here in the United States.”
Obama again sought to convince the American public that it shouldn’t worry about a disease devastating a trio of West African nations, saying the U.S. health infrastructure made him confident “that here in the United States at least, the chances of an outbreak, of an epidemic here, are extraordinarily low.”
In the wake of the first Ebola diagnosis in the United States, Obama said more could be done to protect the American people.
“We have learned some lessons, though, in terms of what happened in Dallas,” Obama said. “We don’t have a lot of margin for error. The procedures and protocols that are put in place must be followed.”
There have been no additional diagnoses following the Ebola episode in Dallas.
Republicans continue to call for a prohibition of all non-essential travel from West Africa, but administration officials insist that such actions would actually limit their ability to halt the spread of the virus in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
