New York and New Jersey will now quarantine medical workers returning from Ebola-stricken countries, while the Obama administration is considering making it a nationwide policy.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced the new automatic quarantine Friday afternoon. The shift comes after a New York physician, Craig Spencer, tested positive for the disease after returning from treating Ebola patients in Guinea with Doctors Without Borders.
“We believe quarantine is the right way to go,” Christie said in a press conference, The New York Times reports.
“This is not the time to take chances,” Cuomo said. He slammed the idea of a voluntary quarantine by health-care workers, saying “it’s almost an oxymoron to me.”
He criticized Spencer in particular for not choosing to quarantine himself.
“He didn’t follow the guidelines for the quarantine — let’s be honest,” Cuomo said. “It’s too serious a situation to leave it to the honor system.”
After returning from Guinea, Spencer checked his temperature twice daily, as fever is often (but not always) the first symptom of an Ebola infection. He came down with a 100.3 degree fever (initially reported as 103 degrees) and gastrointestinal symptoms Thursday morning, but traveled around New York City just hours before on Wednesday night.
Spencer took the A and L subway lines to Brooklyn, went to a bowling alley in Williamsburg and took an Uber taxi back to Manhattan on Wednesday evening. The bowling alley has been shut down so it can be thoroughly disinfected, although health officials said this was out of an “abundance of caution.”
New York’s JFK International Airport and New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International are two of the five U.S. airports which the Obama administration is routing all passengers from West Africa through for active monitoring. Christie and Cuomo announced that they’ll increase screening of all travelers arriving from foreign countries as well. Some will be quarantined for 21 days and others will be medically monitored, according to The New York Times.
Now the administration is considering quarantining health care workers in Ebola hot zones upon their return, to ward off another situation like New York’s, Reuters reports. The city is currently tracking down anyone who could have had contact with Spencer. So far, three people have been quarantined.
“There are a number of options being discussed pertaining to the monitoring and mobility of healthcare workers who are returning to the United States from affected countries,” CDC spokesman Tom Skinner told Reuters.
A quarantine is “one of the options on the table,” Skinner said.
“Whatever option we come up with just simply can’t hamper ability to respond to the situation in West Africa,” Skinner said. “Because as long as that’s going on over there, our risk will never be zero.”
Just two Americans have been infected with Ebola inside the U.S., and both were health care workers, but another five American health care workers, Spencer included, caught the disease while treating patients in Africa.