After fighting Ebola outbreak in Liberia, Ventura County doc helps lead COVID-19 efforts

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Dr. John Fankhauser has stared down this barrel before: Fighting an outbreak that could drain resources, spread from one family to the next and kill far too many.

The physician who serves as CEO of Ventura County Medical Center and Santa Paula Hospital helps plan for where beds would go and how cavalries of nurses and doctors could be found for the surge of COVID-19 patients that could be coming.

He is one person in Ventura County for whom the crisis — alarming and galvanizing simultaneously —  seems familiar.

Months after Fankhauser and his family journeyed from their lives in Ventura to a Liberia hospital on a Christian mission, the Ebola epidemic erupted in 2014. The contagious viral disease killed more 11,000 people in West Africa.

Fankhauser and other health care workers treated patients in a chapel converted into a hospital isolation area. The disease spread. Six patients turned into 250 in days. The flood threatened to overrun supplies of saline and protective gear with shipments sometimes arriving at the last possible moment.

Americans working as doctors and health care workers tested positive for the Ebola virus. Fankhauser treated them too.

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 At one point, he worried a 100.4-degree fever and a throbbing headache meant he was infected.

"I isolated myself from my family in an apartment," Fankhauser said, noting he needed to be tested. "That's when I drew my own blood."

It came back negative. The doctor went back to caring for Ebola patients. When TIME magazine named the people responding to the crisis — Ebola fighters — as their person of the year for 2014, Fankhauser was part of the story.

Before he left for Liberia, Fankhauser was the medical director of Ventura County Medical Center. Last year, he came back to the hospital as CEO.

Now, he works marathon hours seven days a week  to deal with what COVID-19 has already wreaked and what is expected to come. 

He remains both optimistic and vigilant.

"I’ve seen how quickly exponential growth can occur," he said, referring to sudden increases in patients who need hospital care. "My sense is that we have to be hyper vigilant and extremely prepared that this surge is going to feel overwhelming. I have been there and I know how that feels."

The flood of patients and torrent of need can push people beyond their comfort zone, beyond what they thought were boundaries of physical limits. Energy comes from being part of a group wholly committed to facing the crisis together.

"There is a health care workforce that comes to work every day feeling intensely the potential risk of what they’re doing," he said, referring both to Liberia and Ventura County. "Yet their commitment to the community and the patients that we serve drives them to take personal risk to care for others."

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He sees other similarities between the outbreaks, some inspiring, some not.

A recent trip to a large retail store belongs in the other category. Few if any social distancing precautions seemed in place. He saw no attempts to keep people separate or to keep them from touching objects and potentially spreading the virus.

It made Fankhauser think of a trip to a store in Liberia about six weeks into the Ebola outbreak. He encountered a small group of young men who refused to believe the outbreak posed a threat. It was as if their youth made them feel invulnerable.

"There’s still this segment in which they either they don’t believe it or it’s not important to them," he said. "That is terrifying to me."

It took months of social pressure from community leaders and the reality of family or friends infected by the disease before the disbelievers started taking the precautions necessary.

"In that three-month period, we lost a lot of lives we didn’t need to," he said.

The sense of somehow being beyond disaster's reach is not limited just to youth. When Ebola struck West Africa, at least parts of the United States reacted as if it couldn't happen here.

Now it is.

"This pandemic reflects that we're a global society and none of us are invulnerable to these kind of outbreaks," he said.

As Ebola captured West Africa, the coronavirus has captured much of the world. Its spread, and the horror of what it could still do, has become a singular focus so real that at times it feels as if it can't be happening.

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"I guess there's a sense of familiarity in the intensity of the crisis," said Fankhauser. "There are many components of this that feel surreal in the same way they did during the Ebola crisis."

But as Fankhauser thinks of the surge and what else COVID-19 may bring, he sees more than darkness. He sees light.

There will be suffering and pain. There will also be people from every sector of the community pulling together.

"I absolutely think we'll get through this, and I think it will be another reflection of all of us working together and caring for each other," he said.

Tom Kisken covers health care and other news for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tom.kisken@vcstar.com or 805-437-0255.

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