US Hospitals are holding mock Ebola drills – dress rehearsals, if you will – for the day the killer virus comes knocking on their emergency room doors.  They’re mindful not to repeat the case of Thomas Duncan, the Liberian man turned away from a Dallas, Texas emergency room on his first attempt to get help.

Duncan was eventually admitted to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, but not for several days after his initial attempt, after his family made a frantic call to the US Centers for Disease Control looking for direction.  Duncan died ten days after admission, a period during which his family says they were treated shabbily.

A chain of hospitals in the eastern state of Virginia has a team of 25 workers pretending to be Ebola patients, and then assessing the hospital staff’s response.  The team “looks at the screening process, waste disposal, how we’re going to disinfect the room, post-mortem care, everything,” said Michelle Peninger of Inova Health Systems.  “We’re still adding more people as we identify more issues.”

Failing to identify Ebola, then sending a patient home where they can come into contact and infect others, is a situation hospitals are trying to prevent.  For instance, the University of Kansas hospital sprang into action when a 23-year old who had recently been to Sierra Leone showed up with fever and body aches.  Unlike Texas, the young man was promptly isolated while doctors performed tests for the Ebola virus.  Never before was a person so relieved to find out he had Malaria.  But the reaction is considered a success.

“There are two epidemics going on,” said Pritish Tosh, an infectious disease physician and researcher at Mayo Clinic. “There is the real epidemic in West Africa and there is the epidemic of fear in the United States.”