The nurse who was confined in a New Jersey hospital because of concerns that she might have contracted Ebola while treating patients in West Africa said that her quarantine was inhumane, and she’s considering filing a lawsuit against the state, Al-Jazeera reports.
Kaci Hickox, a nurse from Maine who landed in Newark, N.J., after her stay in West Africa, has gone 24 hours without displaying any Ebola-like symptoms, so she’s being taken to her home in Maine via private transportation.
“She became the first person forced into a mandatory quarantine in the state amid fears of Ebola, after New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Friday announced the measure for people arriving at Newark Liberty International Airport from Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia—the three West African countries most affected by the current Ebola outbreak,” Al-Jazeera explained.
Hickox has concerns about the government’s role and its ability to impose health decisions on people. “We have to be very careful about letting politicians make health decisions,” Hickox said in a telephone interview with CNN, during which she called her isolation “inhumane.”
“It’s just a slippery slope, not a sound public health decision […] I want to be treated with compassion and humanity, and don’t feel I’ve been treated that way,” she added.
New Jersey’s Department of Health said that Hickox’s comfort was a priority, since she was fed and given a cellphone, a computer and materials to read.
Both Christie and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo are on the same page about keeping people who came into contact with Ebola patients while in Sierra Leone, Liberia or Guinea quarantined for a period of time. They believe that their protocol is a tad bit better than current federal protocols.
Read more at Al-Jazeera.