A Feisty Nurse vs. Ebola Panic
Nurse Kaci Hickox is still at large, despite efforts by two governors to put her back in captivity.
As such, she has become a threat to public health or a hero to the cause of freedom, science and good sense, depending on your point of view.
Good, rational sense took a beating when governors like Republican Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York decided to come up with their own Ebola strategies, despite pushback from the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Hickox became a central figure in that debate on her way back home to Maine after treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone with Doctors Without Borders. She was stopped at the Newark airport after a forehead scanner indicated a fever, although later oral thermometer readings registered normal.
She was put into in an unheated isolation tent at a New Jersey hospital for three days, even though she has not tested positive for Ebola or showed any symptoms.
The CDC, as you've probably heard by now, says that Ebola victims have to show symptoms to pass the virus to others.
And even then, it is not that easy to catch. For example, none of the relatives who were living in close quarters with Thomas Eric Duncan, the only Ebola death in the United States, caught the disease.
But we live in an age in which it is no longer fashionable in some circles to believe the CDC. Several governors, including Christie, Cuomo, Democrat Pat Quinn of Illinois and Republican Paul LePage of Maine, issued quarantine mandates for anyone who has had contact with Ebola patients.
But after Hickox, her lawyer, health care workers and other sympathizers raised a fuss, she was released to return home. A court in Maine ordered her to stay in town and remain at least three feet away from others, only to lift the order the next day.
Yet contrary to the depictions of some Hickox haters in media and hate mail, the 33-year-old nurse was not running around town trying to kiss everybody or otherwise spread the disease that, by all indications, she did not have.
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