Ten days ago I wrote a post about one of the most salient characteristics of the Obama administration: the failure to protect.
It’s happened time and again: the lack of security in Benghazi. The complete pullout from Iraq. The porous border with Mexico. The lawsuit against the state of Arizona for trying to enforce the protection the White House refuses to institute. The failure to impose visa restrictions on nationals from Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea during the ebola epidemic that’s been raging there for many months.
And now we have this:
The Obama administration has been pushing the governors of New York and New Jersey to reverse their decision ordering all medical workers returning from West Africa who had contact with Ebola patients to be quarantined, an administration official said.
But on Sunday both governors, Andrew M. Cuomo of New York and Chris Christie of New Jersey, stood by their decision, saying that the federal guidelines did not go far enough.
And although Christie’s a Republican, Cuomo is a Democrat. More:
Federal officials made it clear that they do not agree with the governors about the need or effectiveness of a total quarantine for health care workers, though they were careful not to directly criticize the governors themselves.
A senior administration official, who did not want to be identified in order to discuss private conversations with state officials on the issue, called the decision by the governors “uncoordinated, very hurried, an immediate reaction to the New York City case that doesn’t comport with science.”
But the science on this one isn’t settled, although they like to imply it is.
Of course, the lawyers are getting into it, too. Kaci Hickox, a nurse recently returned from treating ebola patients in Sierra Leone, has been complaining about her treatment under quarantine:
Ms. Hickox has retained a well-known civil rights lawyer, Norman Siegel, to challenge the quarantine order and get her out of isolation. In an interview on Sunday, he said the order “raised substantial civil liberties issues.”
“The policy infringes on Kaci Hickox’s constitutional liberty interests,” he said. “The policy is overly broad as applied to Ms. Hickox and we are preparing to challenge it on her behalf.”
Articles about Hickox—who seems petulant and arrogant to me, from what I’ve read—keep mentioning she’s had negative tests for ebola. I hope that Hickox herself doesn’t think that has much meaning at this point—because it doesn’t have much meaning at this point. She should know that, since she’s a nurse:
The virus builds up in the body as patients get sicker. In fact, people in the early stages of Ebola infection often test negative for the virus, because there’s not very much in their blood.
If that weren’t true there would be no need for a 21-day quarantine; the only quarantine necessary would be one long enough to do a blood test and get results back. However, because of the possibility of false negatives (or rather, premature negatives), quarantines sometimes must be imposed.
I think the chances of Ms. Hickox having ebola are extremely slim. But she seems more interested in the public health of patients in Africa than in keeping the disease from spreading in her own country. I would think a nurse might understand that quarantine under these circumstances is not too much to ask. Yes, the quarantine conditions should be made better—she’s the first, and the accommodations sounded makeshift. But that doesn’t mean there’s no need for the quarantine itself.
But, why now? Why was there no hue and cry to quarantine returning medics during earlier epidemics? I believe there were two main reasons for that. The first was that those epidemics were much smaller then the present one, and since no cases happened to arrive here, we were much less aware of the possibilities of its happening. Now we realize it is all too possible. The second is that in previous epidemics fewer health care workers got the disease. One of the shocking hallmarks of the present epidemic is that many of those who have sickened and even died of ebola have been among the biggest experts in the field, people whom we can assume were highly experienced and taking all the precautions necessary.
And yet quite a few have died. Even before Thomas Duncan arrived here, it already had become clear there was something different about this epidemic. Perhaps the virus had mutated and become more easily transmitted. Perhaps the hazmat suits medical staff wore were no longer as effective for that reason. Whatever was going on, we needed to be ultra-careful until we figured out what that difference might be and resolved it.
Well, we haven’t figured it out, and we haven’t resolved it. Instead, authorities initially said that those who got the disease in the West (the two Dallas nurses and the Spanish nurse’s aide) weren’t careful enough; after all, the protocols can’t be at fault. But of course they can—and that’s where a quarantine of returning health care workers comes in. It’s only prudent, until we know more.
