With the confirmation last week of the first case of Ebola in the United States since the recent outbreak of the deadly virus in West Africa, area hospitals say they’re ready if an Ebola patient shows up in this region.

“We’d treat them like any infectious disease patient and isolate them and give them supportive care,” said Julie Robbins, infectious disease specialist for Lawrence Memorial Hospital.

At LMH, a patient suspected of having Ebola would go into contact-and-droplet isolation and be tested for the disease, while being treated by staff members wearing masks, gowns and gloves, Robbins said. The hospital recently began strengthening its screening process to increase the chances it would catch someone who had Ebola. But Robbins noted that, according to the U.S. Centers of the Disease Control and Prevention, the possibility of the disease spreading in the U.S. remains low.

The first U.S. patient with Ebola, Thomas Duncan, is still fighting the virus in a Dallas hospital after inadvertently bringing it into the country from Liberia last month. Ebola, which is spread through the exchange of bodily fluids, initially includes such symptoms as sore throat, fever, muscle aches, headaches and fatigue that worsen as the disease progresses.

Dr. Lee Norman, chief medical officer for Kansas University Hospital, said that even if the U.S. continues to see isolated cases of Ebola, the risk of an outbreak is low because America has the infrastructure in place to prevent the spread of the disease. In areas of West Africa where the outbreak has killed nearly 4,000 people to date, he noted, hospitals often don’t even have syringes, masks or gowns.

“I think we have to keep things in perspective,” Norman said. “In our own country, we have had zero deaths from Ebola and 22,000 deaths from influenza every year. A reasonable person might say that if we had 22,000 deaths every year from Ebola, it would be a national health crisis of cataclysmic measure.”

If someone came to KU Hospital with Ebola-like symptoms, medical staff would sequester the person in a private room and treat them there so the illness could not spread to others, he added.