Morgan Dixon, the fiancee of Dr. Craig Spencer, left the hospital Saturday evening but will remain in quarantine in her upper Manhattan apartment.
Spencer was admitted to Bellevue on Thursday and tested positive for Ebola. His is the first case of the deadly virus in the city.
Dixon and two friends of the couple are in quarantine as a precaution.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said the quarantine for all three would be lifted on Nov. 14.
De Blasio spoke after eating lunch at a Greenwich Village restaurant where Spencer ate earlier this week.
Spencer arrived in New York on Oct. 17 after treating Ebola patients in Guinea.
Meanwhile, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo earlier Friday announced a mandatory 21-day quarantine of medical workers and other airline passengers who have had contact with Ebola victims.
Meanwhile, New York City officials tried to temper fears Friday after a doctor was diagnosed with Ebola in a city where millions of people squeeze into crowded subways, buses and elevators every day.
"I want to repeat what I said last night: There is no cause for alarm," by the doctor's diagnosis Thursday, said Mayor Bill de Blasio, even as officials described Spencer riding the subway, taking a cab, bowling, visiting a coffee shop and eating at a restaurant in the past week. "New Yorkers who have not been exposed to an infected person's bodily fluids are simply not at risk."
Heath officials have repeatedly given assurances that the disease is spread only by direct contact with bodily fluids such as saliva, blood, vomit and feces, and that the dried virus survives on surfaces for only a matter of hours. They say the chances of the average New Yorker contracting Ebola are slim, as someone can't be infected just by being near someone who is sick with Ebola. Someone isn't contagious unless he or she is sick.
The Latest
For the up-to-the-minute updates as they happen, check out our Ebola blog.
The Doctor
Dr. Craig Spencer, the physician now being treated for Ebola in New York City, is the kind of globe-trotting do-gooder who could walk into a small village in Africa and, even though he didn't know the language, win people over through hugs alone, according to people who worked with him.
Even before leaving for Guinea this summer to fight Ebola with Doctors Without Borders, the 33-year-old had amassed an ordinary man's lifetime worth of world travel, much of which was in the service of the poor.
In the past three years alone, Spencer, an attending physician at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, had been to Rwanda to work on an emergency care teaching curriculum, volunteered at a health clinic in Burundi, helped investigate an infectious parasitic disease in the Democratic Republic of Congo and traveled to 32 villages in Indonesia to do a public health survey.
"He was never afraid of getting his hands dirty or his feet dirty," said Dr. Deogratias Niyizonkiza, founder of Village Health Works, the aid group that brought him to Burundi for four months in 2012.
"He went into this environment, a country that is truly off the mark, without knowing the language and he would make everyone feel so comfortable. It's really a daunting task and yet he helped the people immensely," Niyizonkiza said. "He talked to everyone, including the people working in the lab ... Their language was just to hug each other and smile."
In between it all, Spencer ran the ING New York City Marathon in 2013, finishing with a respectable amateur time of 3 hours, 43 minutes.
Ebola survivor Ashoka Mukpo, who was successfully treated in the U.S. after contracting the virus when working in Liberia as a freelance cameraman for NBC, said Saturday that Spencer is a hero.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Mukpo took issue with those who would criticize the doctor for going out in public after returning from West Africa and said there's no evidence Spencer exposed anyone in New York to any risk.
"Dr. Spencer risked his life to treat and lend a hand to people who have very little ability to take care of this problem themselves," Mukpo said from his family's home in Rhode Island. "Before we look at what the implications are of what this case are, I think we need to honor what he did in West Africa and give him the respect he deserves."
Spencer was hospitalized at New York City's Bellevue Hospital Center on Thursday, six days after returning from Guinea. Health officials said he began feeling tired on Tuesday, spent a day out in the city on Wednesday, and then alerted authorities when he developed a fever Thursday morning.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo criticized Spencer, saying he should have stayed home until any danger period for the disease had passed. The virus can hide in the body for up to 21 days before a person develops symptoms.
"Dr. Spencer is a valued fellow and was a volunteer and did great work, but that was a voluntary quarantine situation for 21 days. He's a doctor and even he didn't follow the voluntary quarantine, let's be honest," Cuomo said.
Neither the U.S. Centers for Disease Control nor Doctors without Borders ask health care workers returning from the Ebola hot zone to quarantine themselves, but they do recommend that they monitor their temperature at least twice a day. Spencer was complying with that guidance, officials have said.
Friends of the stricken doctor described him Friday as fun-loving but driven to stay involved in the global health fight.
"Everything else in his life was two, three and four on the priority list," said Dr. Liz Edelstein, a San Diego emergency medicine physician who met Spencer while teaching a course on wilderness medicine.
CLICK HERE for updates on the timeline of events.
The Response
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which will do a further test to confirm the initial results, has dispatched an Ebola response team to New York. President Barack Obama spoke to Cuomo and de Blasio on Thursday night and offered the federal government's support. He asked them to stay in close touch with Ron Klain, his "Ebola czar," and public health officials in Washington.
The CDC has already implemented new protocols to take temperatures of all passengers flying into the US from three West African countries, but some politicians are calling for mandatory self-quarantine of high-risk individuals, including doctors. As stated above, the governors of New York and New Jersey have said those standards do not go far enough, and they have decided to require mandatory quarantine for high-risk individuals. CLICK HERE for more on their decision.
New York City Residents' Fears
Many in the nation's most populous city, with more than 8 million people, were not taking any chances. Friday morning, a group of teenage girls in Catholic school uniforms riding the L subway train passed around a bottle of hand sanitizer. They said they were taking extra precautions because of the Ebola case. It was one of the subway lines the doctor rode after returning home. One commuter called riding the subway "a scary thing."
"If the outbreaks get any more common, I'll be moving out of the city," rider T.J. DeMaso said. "You could catch it and not even know it. You could bring it home to your kids. That's not a chance I want to take."
The MTA on Friday said there's no indication that Dr. Spencer was contagious when he rode the subway and that there were "no reports of bodily fluids on any of the subway lines he rode." The agency says it has updated its protocols on the advice of health experts. Workers get protective equipment and training to remove potentially harmful waste and safely dispose of it. Employees are issued special gloves, use 10 percent bleach solution for disinfection and double-bag any potentially infectious waste.
Spencer's Neighborhood
Officials said the probability was "close to nil" that Spencer's subway rides would pose a risk, but the bowling alley was closed as a precaution, and Spencer's Harlem apartment was cordoned off. The Department of Health was on site across the street from the apartment building Thursday night, giving out information to area residents. Crews performed a full-scale cleaning of the property on Friday.
Veronica Lopez, who lives in the building next to the doctor, said "people were joking about it" but when the doctor's diagnosis was announced they "went crazy." She said she heard the city was notifying residents via fliers "and my roommate was freaking out because we didn't get a flier." But Tanya Thomas, 47, who lives in Spencer's building, was matter-a-fact about the whole thing. "He's the one with Ebola," she said. "If I get it, I get it."
Evageline Love also was unconcerned. "I saw the mayor and the governor. What they're saying, I believe, is true. There's no need for hysteria," she said as he rode the L train to work.
The Ebola Epidemic
More than 10,000 people have been infected with Ebola and nearly half of them have died, according to figures released Saturday by the World Health Organization, as the outbreak continues to spread.
The Ebola epidemic in West Africa is the largest ever outbreak of the disease with a rapidly rising death toll in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. There have also been cases in three other West African countries, Spain and the United States.
The U.N. health agency said Saturday that the number of confirmed, probable and suspected cases has risen to 10,141. Of those cases, 4,922 people have died. Its figures show about 200 new cases since the last report, four days ago.
Even those grisly tolls are likely an underestimate, WHO has warned, as many people in the hardest hit countries have been unable or too frightened to seek medical care. A shortage of labs capable of handling potentially infected blood samples has also made it difficult to track the outbreak. For example, the latest numbers show no change in Liberia's case toll, suggesting the numbers may be lagging behind reality.
On Thursday, authorities confirmed that the disease had spread to Mali, the sixth West African country affected, and on the same day a new case was confirmed in New York, in a doctor recently returned from Guinea.
Mali had long been considered highly vulnerable to the disease, since it shares a border with Guinea. The disease arrived there in a 2-year-old, who traveled from Guinea with her grandmother by bus and died Friday.
The toddler, who was bleeding from her nose during the journey, may have had high-risk contact with many people, the World Health Organization warned. So far, 43 people are being monitored in isolation for signs of the disease, and WHO said Saturday that authorities are continuing to look for more people at risk. Malian border police said Saturday that neighboring Mauritania closed its border with Mali in the wake of the case.
To help fight Ebola, the U.N. humanitarian flight service airlifted about 1 ton of medical supplies to Mali late Friday. The seats of the plane were removed to make room for the cargo, which included hazard suits for health workers, surgical gloves, face shields and buckets, according to the World Food Program, which runs the flights.
In Liberia, the country hardest hit by the epidemic, U.S. forces have been building desperately needed treatment centers and helping to bring in aid. On Saturday, Maj. Gen. Darryl Williams, who was in charge of the troops assigned to the Ebola response, handed power to Maj. Gen. Gary J. Volesky, the 101st Airborne commander.
"I've been told that by a number of people that the task we face is extremely hard. Well, a fairly famous person once said hard is not impossible," Volesky said. "Together, we're going to beat it."
Meanwhile, some in Ghana were worried that a strike by health care workers that began Friday could leave the country vulnerable to Ebola. Ghana does not border any country with reported cases, but it is serving as the headquarters for the U.N. mission on Ebola.