A male who traveled from Liberia and was being treated as a "potential Ebola patient" at an Inglewood hospital is no longer a suspected case for Ebola and could be released within hours, according to the Los Angeles County health department.
Officials said the patient doesn't meet the criteria for Ebola and there are no cases or suspected cases of it in Los Angeles County.
Earlier hospital officials said they had taken precautionary measures for the patient who traveled from Liberia.
The patient was taken by ambulance from LAX to Centinela Hospital Medical Center Tuesday night, and the ambulance personnel told hospital staff that the patient traveled from Liberia, the hospital said in a statement.
In a press released titled "Centinela Hospital Statement of Potential Ebola Patient in ER," hospital officials stressed the patient did not have symptoms of the deadly virus.
"The patient does not have any symptoms of Ebola, however due to travel history appropriate precautions were implemented," the statement says.
Centinela Chief Executive Linda Bradley said in a written statement that the ER team did a "precise and thorough job of implementing our full protocol.
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"They acted quickly and decisively in determining the status of the patient and contacted all necessary authorities," she said.
Inglewood Mayor James Butts said hospital staff have been preparing for something like this for months and all systems worked.
"They had a complete protocol in place so that they would isolate the zone that the patient would travel through," Butts said. "We have full confidence in the staff and leadership at Centinela Hospital to monitor the situation and keep us updated as necessary."
A White House spokesman said an additional layer of screening would begin at New York's JFK International and the international airports in Newark, Washington Dulles, Chicago and Atlanta.
The airport screening was not put in place at LAX because the majority of flights to and from Ebola-stricken areas do not go through Los Angeles, officials said. The five selected airports cover the destinations of 94 percent of the people who travel to the U.S. from the three heavily hit countries in West Africa — Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
Gordon Tokumatsu contributed to this report.
