A 23-year-old woman with suspected symptoms of the deadly Ebola virus was taken to hospital in an isolator yesterday during a coordinated simulation exercise involving some 20 people.

This was the scenario set up in Mosta on St Rocco Street, the saint who is coincidentally invoked against epidemics.

The ‘patient’ arrived on a flight from Rome on Tuesday after spending 21 days in Liberia, one of the hotbeds of the Ebola outbreak.

She had immediately informed the airport authorities and was examined at the clinic where she was assessed as a low-risk case then monitored by the Public Health Department.

Yesterday morning, however, the authorities received a call from her mother as she woke up with a temperature of 38.9°C. She was also suffering from diarrhoea and a headache.

Authorities started tracking down people she might have been in contact with

A purposely set up core team, including people from the Infectious Disease Unit and the Accident and Emergency Department, met in a contingency room at Mater Dei Hospital’s Anaesthesia Department and planned the woman’s retrieval as a possible Ebola patient.

A team of 15 medics and civil protection officers started arriving outside her house at 10.30am.

Police officers were already on site to cordon off the area.

With rain pelting down throughout the entire operation, the team put up a decontamination tent and started wearing protective clothing.

On site there were also around seven vehicles, including an ambulance, a back-up ambulance and a major incident unit truck.

In the meantime, the relatives of the 23-year-old were told to stay away from the ‘patient’ and the authorities started tracking down people she might have got in contact with.

At around 12.15pm the woman was taken out of her house in an isolator, which was decontaminated before a separate team lifted her into an ambulance and taken to Mater Dei Hospital. Once there, the patient was transferred to a secluded ward, bypassing the emergency department.

Meanwhile, the team on St Rocco Street continued with the 45-step decontamin­­-ation process.

Yesterday’s drill follows thousands of hours of training for staff at the hospital and simulations in various areas to test out different scenarios of a person falling ill with the deadly virus.

Meanwhile, screening has been enhanced at airports and Mater Dei Hospital is fully capable of handling a case of Ebola with an adequate isolation facility.

More than 13,500 cases of Ebola have been reported in Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Senegal, Spain and the US. Nearly 5,000 of these were fatal.