Ebola Quarantine: Trooper Parked Outside Nurse Kaci Hickox Threatened With Arrest
During a Today Show interview Nurse Kaci Hickox told Matt Lauer that she doesn't plan on sticking to the guidelines of the quarantine and feels like a prisoner in her own home.
If the restrictions placed on me by the state of Maine are not lifted by Thursday morning, I will go to court to fight for my freedom.
When Matt Lauer asked Nurse Kaci Hickox why she was against a quarantine 6 states have adopted and pointed out that troops who serve in West Africa are quarantined as standard operating procedure for 21 days before returning stateside, she opined that the quarantine is unconstitutional and unscientific. She said as long as she does not have symptoms, she is not contagious. Kaci Hickox's Ebola test came back negative.
Matt reminded her that she had a temperature of 101 measured at Newark Liberty International Airport and pointed out that Dr. Craig Spencer was out and about in NYC prior to being diagnosed with Ebola, which struck fear in public officials serving a "metropolis of 9 million people."
She thinks "we need to fight Ebola at its source in West Africa right now" and feels that the 3 week quarantine will deter health care workers from going because of the additional time constraints on their schedules. She said "My four weeks in Sierra Leone were amazing" and she plans to go back. She hopes that we can find a compromise that would not be punitive to health care workers when they return home to ensure public health and peace of mind with more education about the disease.
There are health care professionals willing to go to West Africa, but they have to go voluntarily and take time off from work, which is a financial hardship. This begs the question: why doesn't the US government pay for their service and provide the care they need when they return?
Home quarantine is a reasonable step up from being quarantined in a cold tent at an airport with a port-a-potty. Perhaps the next more reasonable step could be that health care workers could wear a bracelet that beeps when their temperature is elevated as a compromise to quarantining health care volunteers with state troopers parked outside their homes.