In Dallas, fear of Ebola seeps into daily routines

The deadly Ebola virus has struck three people all living within a few miles of one another — and of Christine Carey.

Since the first patient was diagnosed Sept. 30, Carey has been attending news conferences and pestering public officials to disclose more about those infected and exposed. It seems that everywhere the self-employed artist, baker and stay-at-home mother of three goes in Dallas these days, she finds signs of fear and worry.

When Carey, 44, ran to the bank Wednesday, staff were talking about Ebola and the normal crowd of customers was notably absent. When Carey asked why, workers referred her to a popular local Twitter hashtag: #BecauseEbola. As in “I’m stocking up on Germ X #BecauseEbola” or “I don’t want to fly back home anymore #becauseebola.”

Carey noticed something else new at the bank.

“They’re spraying down everything” with sanitizer, she said. “The drive-through, everything.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising that on Thursday her 11-year-old daughter made a birthday wish: “Please, Mom, no Ebola.”

But after her daughter went to school, Carey figured she could still squeeze in a few hours as an amateur disease detective, driving by the latest patient’s apartment, where an 18-wheeler was being unloaded under police guard, and later attending an emergency meeting called by city and county officials. And she still had time to swing by school to drop off birthday cupcakes.

“Everybody I’ve talked to wants to know where everyone who has Ebola shopped, went to the gym, got their nails done,” Carey said.

One of the patients was transferred to Atlanta on Wednesday and another was being transferred Thursday to Maryland, but that didn’t dampen the anxiety palpable here. As Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, the county’s highest elected official, put it: “There’s a lot of concentric circles of concern.”

Some Texas schools closed as a precaution Thursday, including three with students who had flown on a Frontier Airlines jet with the third Ebola patient shortly before she was diagnosed.

“I have a friend in Atlanta who said, ‘Please don’t send Ebola people here,’” Carey said.

Concern goes well beyond Texas. A Kaiser Family Foundation Tracking Poll released Thursday found that 45% of respondents said they were worried that they or a family member would contract the disease. Some schools in Ohio also closed because of a connection to the Frontier Airlines flight.

Carey has stopped outside the apartments of the second patient, nurse Nina Pham, 26, and the first, Thomas Eric Duncan, 42, who died Oct. 8. She visited some of Duncan’s relatives who are in isolation, and dropped off rent money and food — fixings for West African rice — at a safe distance.

On Wednesday, Carey visited the media horde outside the apartment of the third patient, Amber Vinson, 29, a nurse at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital.

Sana Syed, a city spokeswoman, stood near police tape at the entrance, explaining that officials had informed 330 residents within a four-block radius and were reaching out to more.

Syed said officials had learned from the last two cases that they needed staff on site to answer residents’ questions. Her message to residents: “Don’t panic — this is all being done for your safety.”

Unwilling to trust officials, Carey texted a friend who lives in the complex with a 5-year-old son. Her friend replied that he was worried about contamination and asked whether experts should be testing the birds and squirrels who rooted through the trash for signs of Ebola.

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings acknowledged that the mood in Dallas had changed this week. “I think this most recent situation — we’ve ramped this anxiety up. I think it’s natural,” he said.

When Carey stopped at her neighborhood Albertson’s on Wednesday, she said, “One of my cashiers started sneezing and she couldn’t stop, and she looked at me and said, ‘I’m sorry, everyone’s going to think I have Ebola.’”

Carey told the cashier what she had just heard on the news: The latest Ebola patient, a nurse, had recently been on a plane. “She threw up her hands and said, ‘Jesus, take the wheel!’”

Carey also stopped at one of her children’s schools, Woodrow Wilson High, to ask officials whether the parents of any students were among the 135 people being monitored by public health officials for signs of Ebola.

“They kind of looked at me and smiled like, ‘We’re not telling you anything, but we know stuff,’” she said.

“I’ve been trying to find a list of the schools, anyone who they’re monitoring who has children,” she said. “I haven’t been able to get it. I understand there’s privacy issues and that’s probably not going to happen. But just if they could say there’s somebody who’s working at Presbyterian whose kids go to this school so parents could make up their own minds.”

By Wednesday, she had modified her Facebook page to include the local Lakewood Theater marquee, which read: “Ebola: Fact not fear.” That’s the theme of the city’s public awareness campaign, and a local television station was hosting a town hall where health experts answered questions from the public.

The questions were many.

Referring to protective orders to restrict the movement of people being monitored for exposure to Ebola, someone asked: “If a person has a protective order and they leave, what is the response? Do they Taser them? Arrest them?”

If the neighborhood’s safe, why do Ebola patients’ apartments need to be decontaminated by workers in hazmat suits?

One of Pham’s neighbor’s asked: “Am I OK riding the bus? Am I OK going up to the Wal-Mart? We keep getting conflicting messages from the government.”

Teresa Morales, 53, a nurse’s assistant at Texas Health Presbyterian, said she and her colleagues faced a stigma.

“We have gone to restaurants and they don’t want to eat with us,” Morales said of people who learn she works at the hospital, where Duncan died on Oct. 8.

Retired paramedic Richard Jackson, 60, asked what was being done to alert paramedics who might have to respond to those being monitored for signs of Ebola.

He lives in the suburb of Mesquite and neighbors told him they wouldn’t venture into Dallas for the town hall.

“They said, ‘What? You’re going down there to get infected?’” he said.

Jackson said residents should be afraid. “But it needs to be an educated fear — the right level of fear so that we can take precautions as a society,” he said.

Carey lingered at the back of the room. She didn’t ask any questions; she would post them later on Facebook. While she was grateful for the forum, many of her questions were still unanswered. She headed home feeling ill at ease, as she often does these days.

molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com

Twitter: @mollyhf