Quarantined nurse allowed to go home after hiring civil-rights lawyer for legal challenge
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Updated: A nurse quarantined at a New Jersey hospital because she treated Ebola patients will be allowed to go home after hiring a civil-rights lawyer to challenge her confinement.
Kaci Hickox, 33, was detained at Newark Liberty International Airport after returning from Sierra Leone on Friday under a mandatory quarantine established by the state, report the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal (sub. req.) and Reuters. She hired civil-rights lawyer Norman Siegel, the former executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, to represent her.
New York state and New Jersey announced the mandatory 21-day quarantines last week for health-care workers returning here after working with Ebola patients. The federal government pressured governors of both states to relent, and the governors indicated a change in stance on Sunday night. Both said health workers who worked with Ebola patients in Africa would be allowed to remain at home during the quarantines, the New York Times reports in a separate story.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said on Monday that Hickox will be able to go to her home in Maine, but she will remain quarantined there, the New York Times reported on Monday.
Before Christie’s announcement, Siegel told Reuters that the confinement of Hickox raises “serious constitutional and civil liberties issues” because she has no symptoms and has not tested positive for Ebola. “We’re not going to dispute that the government has, under certain circumstances, the right to issue a quarantine,” he said. “The policy is overly broad when applied to her.”
“We’ll try within the next week to file something on her behalf,” Siegel told the Wall Street Journal for its story published on Sunday, before Christie said Hickox could go home. “We could be setting a precedent here.”
Georgetown University law professor Lawrence Gostin told the Wall Street Journal in the Sunday story that Hickox could challenge her quarantine in two ways. She could contend that New Jersey’s policy is overinclusive in that it applies to people without an individualized assessment of risk. And she could assert that she wasn’t detained in a humane health environment.
“That pushes the envelope more than I’ve seen it in my lifetime,” he said. “We are basically depriving individuals of liberty for 21 days just because they have traveled from a particular part of the world. That seems to me wrong legally, and ethically and is against science.”
But Cornell University law professor Michael Dorf told the Wall Street Journal that there is no serious doubt that states can quarantine if “it’s not completely divorced from reality.”
Hickox was being kept in an isolation tent with a portable toilet, but no shower or television, the New York Times says. She did have access to a cellphone and reading materials, according to the Wall street Journal. On Sunday, Hickox declared that Gov. Chris Christie has “messed with the wrong redhead.”
In an essay for the Dallas Morning News, Hickox said her temperature at the airport, taken with a forehead scanner, was initially recorded at 98. Four hours later, Hickox was increasingly upset and her temperature registered 101. She asserted that the higher temperature was due to being flushed and upset and asked for an oral thermometer. Six hours after she arrived at the airport, she was told she was going to a hospital. Once she arrived, her temperature was recorded at 98.6 with an oral thermometer and 101 with the forehead scanner.
“This is not a situation I would wish on anyone,” Hickox wrote, “and I am scared for those who will follow me.”
Updated at 8:45 a.m. to include Christie’s announcement that Hickox can go home.
