Omaha Steaks, Nerf basketball and Hazmat suits: Former contagion patients describe life in quarantine amid Hantavirus - NBC News

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“I want the people who are being affected by this, who are in quarantine or who have loved ones who are in quarantine, to rest assured that they are in the best of hands,” Dr. Kent Brantly, who spent weeks in isolation after contracting Ebola in 2014, told NBC News. “They are in the best place to be taken care of.”

The outbreak has killed three people and sickened 11 since it was first identified aboard the expedition cruise ship MV Hondius during its monthlong voyage in early May. The 18 Americans aboard the ship arrived stateside on Monday after days inside their cabins, before returning to quarantine in facilities designed to house people exposed to infectious diseases.

Two patients were being monitored at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta before joining the 16 others on Friday at the National Quarantine Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. None of the Americans has tested positive for the virus, though they could remain isolated for up to 42 days, the World Health Organization said Friday.

Brantly is among the few Americans who can relate to the cruise passengers’ ordeal. After contracting Ebola during a mission trip to Liberia in 2014, he spent three weeks inside Emory University Hospital’s biocontainment unit. The 11-bed unit, opened in 2005, has a dedicated laboratory and HEPA-filtered, negative-pressure rooms that prevent pathogens from escaping into all patient rooms.

As the first American Ebola patient to be treated at the facility, Brantly lived in a “decent-sized hospital room with its own bathroom” outfitted for intensive infection control. He was monitored around the clock, and a nurse wearing personal protective equipment was constantly at his bedside.

He was hooked up to monitors tracking his vital signs and administered IV fluids, underwent frequent blood draws and received an experimental treatment that had previously only been tested on animals.

“The team of doctors that attended to me were consummate professionals and experts in their field, but also just really incredible people,” Brantly said. “I have such confidence that the team there and at Nebraska are completely prepared to take care of a situation just like this one.”

Once he began regaining strength, Brantly said, nurses coached him through physical therapy exercises from inside the room. To pass the time, they played Nerf basketball together and spent hours talking about faith, family and life outside the hospital walls.

“They not only treated my medical condition, but they really cared for me holistically as a person,” Brantly said. “My physical well-being, but also my emotional and mental well-being.”

More than a decade later, hantavirus cruise passengers are experiencing some of the same rhythms of confinement Brantly remembers from his time inside Emory’s isolation unit.

Among them is Jake Rosmarin, a Boston-based social media creator who boarded the Hondius for a “content work trip” and has been inside Nebraska’s National Quarantine Unit since Monday. The only federally funded quarantine unit in the country features 20 single-occupancy rooms, each with a special air pressure system that filters clean air into each room. The building’s biocontainment unit, across the street, can fit up to 10 patients in five rooms. Currently, one of those rooms is being used as an in-house lab.

Since entering the unit, Rosmarin has been providing an inside look at life in quarantine via Instagram, with room tours, day-in-the-life videos and documentation of his first sip of iced coffee in weeks.

His room inside the Omaha facility includes a bed, a smart TV and a spin bike. Nurses deliver three meals a day, but he said he is allowed to order takeout — including Chipotle, which he was looking forward to ordering when he spoke to NBC News earlier this week.

Since his arrival, Rosmarin has decorated one wall with posters of major cities, added a blanket and a stuffed animal to his bed, and set up a tea station on one counter. From family care packages, Rosmarin said he has been enjoying puzzles and a charcuterie board he had to break down into zip-close bags because it was too big to finish in one sitting.