The White House today put added pressure on the governors of New York and New Jersey to ease up on their tough quarantine rules, in the recent face of a local doctor from Manhattan being discovered with ebola.
Governor's Andrew Cuomo of New York and Chris Christie of New Jersey said late Sunday night that their policies now allow medical workers to be confined in their homes while receiving twice-a-day monitoring from health officials, according to a report in the New York Times.
On Friday, both governors had announced mandatory 21-day quarantines for health care workers returning from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the three countries ravaged by the virus.
The Times reported that Obama administration officials and much of the U.S. medical community criticized the mandatory quarantines. They said the quarantines would discourage doctors, nurses and other health professionals from traveling to West Africa to combat the epidemic that has infected more than 10,000 people and claimed more than 4,900 lives.
Kaci Hickox, a nurse from Maine, returned from Sierra Leone and was quarantined Friday in New Jersey under the new measures. Despite having no symptoms, she was kept under quarantine at a hospital in New Jersey, confined to a tent equipped with a portable toilet and no shower.
Monday morning, Christie announced that Hickox would be allowed to return to Maine, where it will be up to local health officials to decide how they will monitor the 33-year-old woman to be sure she isn't infected with Ebola, The Times reported.
The initial quarantine measures, which exceeded current federal guidelines, meant that health care workers who had contact with Ebola patients would be tested and kept in quarantine for 21 days, the longest known length of incubation of the Ebola virus.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Sunday that he did not favor such a quarantine because it could discourage health workers from going to West Africa to help battle the Ebola outbreak, the Associated Pressreported.
"The best way to protect us is to stop the epidemic in Africa, and we need those health care workers so we do not want to put them in a position where it makes it very, very uncomfortable for them to even volunteer to go," Fauci told AP.'
