WASHINGTON Wed Oct 15, 2014 12:27pm EDT
U.S. President Barack Obama listens to Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Director Tom Frieden via telephone to receive an update on the administration's response to the Ebola case in Dallas and in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington October 13, 2014.
Credit: Reuters/Kevin LamarqueWASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama abruptly postponed a political trip he was to make on Wednesday to stay at the White House to convene a high-level meeting about the Ebola outbreak.
The White House said Obama's trip to New Jersey and Connecticut has been postponed. He had planned to attend a Democratic fundraiser in Union, New Jersey, and headline a rally for the re-election of Democratic Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
"Later this afternoon, the president will convene a meeting at the White House of his team coordinating the government's response to the Ebola outbreak," spokesman Josh Earnest said.
The move suggested a higher level of concern at the White House after reports emerged that a second Texas healthcare worker who tested positive for Ebola after caring for a patient with the virus had traveled by plane a day before she reported symptoms.
The worker at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas had taken a Frontier Airlines flight from Cleveland, Ohio, to Dallas-Fort Worth on Oct. 13, officials said.
Obama said on Tuesday that the U.S. public healthcare infrastructure is such that an Ebola epidemic in the United States is highly unlikely.
"But obviously one case is too many, we've got to keep on doing everything we can," he said.
(Reporting By Roberta Rampton and Steve Holland; Editing by Doina Chiacu and Susan Heavey)
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