In a firsthand account of her experience under a mandatory Ebola quarantine in New Jersey, a health care worker condemned the process, calling it disorganized, frightening and chaotic.
Kaci Hickox, the first traveler quarantined Friday under guidelines announced the same day, wrote the account for the Dallas Morning News in a piece that appeared Saturday. Preliminary tests for Ebola came back negative for the woman, a nurse who had been working with Doctors Without Borders in Sierra Leone in West Africa.
“I am scared about how health care workers will be treated at airports when they declare that they have been fighting Ebola in West Africa,” she wrote in the Dallas paper. “I am scared that, like me, they will arrive and see a frenzy of disorganization, fear and, most frightening, quarantine.”
Lawmakers in New York and New Jersey Friday imposed a new screening system that moves beyond guidelines already established by federal officials for travelers returning from some West African nations. Medical personnel and other travelers returning from some West African nations and who had direct contact with Ebola victims will be quarantined for 21 days under the new guidelines.
Read more at the Dallas Morning News.