US building Ebola quarantine center in Kenya for Americans amid outbreak | Trump administration

The Trump administration is building a quarantine and treatment center in Kenya instead of bringing home Americans affected by the Ebola outbreak.

On Wednesday, the White House confirmed that the United States will establish a facility in Kenya to quarantine Americans following exposure to Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

“The facility is designed to provide access to high-quality care for Americans who need to quickly exit and quarantine from the Democratic Republic of Congo, without the risk of a long journey back to the US,” a White House official told the Guardian.

The official said the center will also treat Americans who contract Ebola — “including those with critical care needs, but each case will be evaluated for escalation for further advanced care as appropriate to maximize patient outcomes.”

The official did not clarify whether further shipments would be to the United States or to Europe, where other Americans have been taken for quarantine and treatment. The official also did not say whether Americans would be allowed to return to the United States if they did not want to go to Kenya.

The United States has banned green card holders who recently traveled to the DRC, Uganda, and South Sudan from returning home, and others who have recently traveled to those three countries have also been banned from entering the United States.

“The administration is trying to prevent Americans from coming home to receive the proven world-class care that our taxpayer-funded biocontainment and treatment units provide,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health.

“There are deep ethical concerns about this approach,” he added. “Without adequate plans for the safe quarantine of exposed persons and the immediate isolation of those infected, I fear that these facilities may increase the spread of the virus. The possibility of not being able to come home for safe and effective care may prevent people from disclosing their exposure, which may drive cases underground and allow the virus to spread further.”

Americans who responded to previous outbreaks—whether caring directly for patients or organizing the logistics of contact tracing and safe burial teams—knew that if they got sick, they could return home and receive the best medical care in the world.

Without these safeguards and the prospect of being indefinitely prevented from returning home to friends and family, U.S. experts are now much less likely to volunteer.

“This basically means telling American healthcare workers who will be working on the effort to contain this outbreak that if they get sick, they can’t come home,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International and former executive director of the USAID Covid-19 task force, as well as a former leader of the 2014-2015 USAID Ebola response. “It deters people from going. We faced this exact scenario in 2014 (cases coming back to the US) and we fought really hard not to impose a travel ban because we knew that would ultimately be counterproductive to the goal of ending the epidemic.”

If a person is asymptomatic, transportation risks are extremely low, and the United States has extensive experience evacuating people who have been exposed to Ebola or other infectious pathogens and test positive.