“Nurse in a Tent” and Dr. Spencer Take 2: The Best evidence for Mandatory Isolation and Quarantine

So you know the beginning of the story once the nurse returned from West Africa--she was placed into forced isolation/quarantine by N.J. Governor Christi’s executive order.  University Hospital in Newark set up a tent to receive such persons and for several days the Nurse resided in this facility, and became the “Nurse in a Tent”.   After fussing about the conditions of her quarantine and making noise concerning her rights she was allowed to “escape” to her home state of Maine, where she was again placed under supervised quarantine by executive order of the Governor of Maine.  Vowing to ignore the forced quarantine the “Nurse in a Tent” did in fact leave her quarantine and went bicycling in her community, held several news conferences, hired several lawyers, and, in general became the poster child for quarantine disobedience.  Her lawyers’ argued that her civil rights were being violated, and so convinced a judge to allow her to break quarantine.  Listening to the “Nurse in a Tent”, her lawyers, and the judge, and the potential damage they could have caused through a manipulation of our legal system, provides the very best evidence that we need a strong Federal policy of forced isolation and quarantine for those returning from West Africa during the Ebola epidemic.  An even better practice would be to have the quarantine take place before the persons board an aircraft for the U.S. 

The case of the NY doctor, Craig Spencer, more so demonstrates the real need for forced isolation—as of today, November 5, 2014, over 350 people are in semi-quarantine in New York City because of Spencer’s disregard of his potential for harboring the Ebola virus—which as it turns out-he was infected!  I continue to hope that we luck-out and no one catches the Ebola infection due to Spencer’s poor judgment or gross denial.  In our society we often must balance one set of rights against another set of rights.  In the Spencer case we need to make a judgment on his right to move freely about New York vs the rights of all of New York people to be free of the fear of infection or actually free of being infected—even if the absolute risk of infection is very low.  Spencer made a very bad decision and many are suffering.  Our governments’ inaction has enabled this bad behavior.

This situation of poor individual decisions having bad consequences cannot be allowed to continue.  In the case of Ebola we have been very fortunate/lucky in that this deadly virus in its current form is not very contagious.  I am concerned about possible mutations of the Ebola virus or the next deadly virus that could be air transmitted.  We should not kid ourselves—next time we may not be so lucky.

Steven Keller, Ph.D.

Professor, New Jersey Medical School—Rutgers University