“My job is not to represent her. My job is to represent the people of New Jersey.” Yes! I am with the Gov. on this particular issue. He is trying to keep the majority safe. So nurse, please do not make this about you.. Go with the flow and then go home. Thank you for your service though..#smh
Even as New Jersey officials released a nurse they had kept quarantined in a tent since her return from treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, an unapologetic Gov. Chris Christie dismissed those who questioned his handling of the case and denied that he had reversed himself.
The nurse, Kaci Hickox, 33, who had been working with Doctors Without Borders, became the first public test case for a mandatory quarantine that both Mr. Christie and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York announced on Friday.
Ms. Hickox’s lawyer, Steven Hyman, said that she had been released midday Monday from University Hospital in Newark. A hospital spokeswoman said that two black sport utility vehicles with tinted windows were headed to Maine, with the patient as a passenger in one. The spokeswoman, Stacie Newton, declined to say where in Maine the convoy was going, or whose vehicles they were.
The nurse’s departure, enshrouded in secrecy, capped a whirlwind four days in which Ms. Hickox criticized Gov. Christie’s quarantine policy, hired a legal team to defend her civil rights and had the governor defending a policy that he announced in association with New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.
The details of that quarantine seem to have evolved in both states since Friday.
“I didn’t reverse my decision,” Governor Christie said from the Brevard Zoo in Melbourne, Fla., where he was campaigning for Gov. Rick Scott. “She hadn’t had any symptoms for 24 hours. And she tested negative for Ebola. So there was no reason to keep her. The reason she was put into the hospital in the first place was because she was running a high fever and was symptomatic.”
After Ms. Hickox landed at Newark Liberty International Airport on Friday, a forehead scanner showed she had a temperature of 101, which prompted concern as fever is a symptom of the Ebola virus. Ms. Hickox later said that the reading came because she was flushed and upset. A later reading by an oral thermometer recorded a normal temperature of 98.6.
“If people are symptomatic they go into the hospital,” Mr. Christie said. “If they live in New Jersey, they can quarantine at home. If they don’t, and they’re not symptomatic, then we set up quarantine for them out of state. But if they are symptomatic, they’re going to the hospital.”
On Sunday, Mr. Cuomo relaxed New York’s mandatory quarantine, allowing New York resident health care workers to be at home and to be compensated for lost income.
But Mr. Christie remained adamant that there had been reason to quarantine Ms. Hickox in a tent, with a portable toilet, but no shower or television. “She was obviously ill enough that the C.D.C. and medical officials hospitalized her and gave her an Ebola test,” Mr. Christie said on Monday. “They don’t do that just for fun. That’s a very specific, difficult, expensive test to do.”Mr. Christie then compared Ms. Hickox’s plight to that of any airline traveler.
“Any of us have seen people who are traveling and they’ve been stopped, whether they are late for a plane or whatever they are doing, they get upset and angry,” he said. “That’s fine. I have absolutely nothing but good will for her going forward. She’s a good person and went over and was doing good work over in West Africa
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