They both declared they would quarantine health workers returning from West Africa. They did so without consulting health officials on any level (including federal), and without consulting or even informing the local governments and hospitals that would be expected to enforce the quarantines.
Thanks to a doubly courageous nurse, the whole thing unraveled.
Courageous because Kaci Hickox, a nurse and epidemiologist was out on the front lines with Doctors Without Borders, which may well be the most effective organization in dealing with the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. She returned from Sierra Leone Friday, was detained at Newark International Airport and incarcerated at University Hospital.
She was doubly courageous because (despite Christie's belief she would "understand") she let the world know what was done to her.
She showed no symptoms, contrary to what Governor Christie stated publicly. Christie has continued to lie about this. She was confined in a situation that pretty much describes a small town lockup, only maybe worse. It's not clear if as this LA Times story says she was lodged in a tent essentially outdoors--other stories suggest it was indoors. But basically it tells the story.
Federal officials immediately criticized the quarantines as medically unnecessary, and sending the wrong messages. Medical experts including the New England Journal of Medicine called them "more destructive than beneficial." The new CDC guidelines don't recommend quarantines except in closely defined high risk cases.
Whatever case could be made for quarantine, these were so rushed and unconsidered on any basis other than political, that they were clearly the result of panic. Not what you want to see in leaders.
Now the "quarantines" are officially to be served at home. House arrest, essentially. Kaci Hickox returned to her home in Maine.
As usual the definitive words come from the Borowitz Report which "reported": "Saying that he was “sick and tired of having my medical credentials questioned,” Governor Chris Christie (R-N.J.) had himself sworn in as a medical doctor on Sunday night.
Dr. Christie acknowledged that becoming a doctor generally requires pre-med classes, four years of medical school, plus additional years of residency, but he said that the Ebola epidemic compelled him to take “extraordinary measures, as we say in the medical profession.”
A few days earlier Borowitz also reported:
"Amid concerns that the spreading fear of Ebola has become a greater threat than the virus itself, a new poll shows that a majority of Americans favor a quarantine of the CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer.
While poll respondents supported quarantining more than a dozen cable-news personalities, including the entire cast of “Fox & Friends,” a full seventy-two per cent gave the nod to a quarantine of Blitzer.
At the Centers for Disease Control, a spokesman said that a Blitzer quarantine was “very much on the table,” and that the C.D.C. had come up with a workable plan.
“Essentially, we would do a lockdown of ‘The Situation Room’ and provide Wolf with food and water until the crisis passes,” he said.
Perhaps they'll find room for the governors of New York and New Jersey, and their egos.
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