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originally posted by: xuenchen
Hmmmm.................
Chris Christie was forced on Monday to allow a nurse being kept in a tent in a hospital parking lot to go home after intense White House pressure to relax a mandatory 21-day quarantine the New Jersey Governor had imposed at a state level
Even as New Jersey officials on Monday released a nurse they had kept quarantined in a tent since her return from treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, an unapologetic Gov. Chris Christie dismissed those who questioned his handling of the case and denied that he had reversed himself.
The nurse, Kaci Hickox, 33, who had been working with Doctors Without Borders, became the first public test case for a mandatory quarantine that both Mr. Christie and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York announced on Friday.
Ms. Hickox’s lawyer, Steven Hyman, said she had been released midday on Monday from University Hospital in Newark. A hospital spokeswoman said that two black S.U.V.s with tinted windows were headed to Maine, with the patient as a passenger in one. The spokeswoman, Stacie Newton, declined to say where in Maine the convoy was going, or whose vehicles they were.
A hospital spokeswoman said that two black S.U.V.s with tinted windows were headed to Maine, with the patient as a passenger in one. The spokeswoman, Stacie Newton, declined to say where in Maine the convoy was going, or whose vehicles they were.
"Upon the healthcare workers' return home, we will follow the guidelines set by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control for medical workers who have been in contact with Ebola patients," LePage [governor] said in a statement. "Additionally, we will work with the healthcare worker to establish an in-home quarantine protocol to ensure there is no direct contact with other Mainers until the period for potential infection has passed."
He said the state would work to make the nurse "as comfortable as possible."
...
"We fully expect individuals to voluntarily comply with an in-home quarantine," LePage spokeswoman Adrienne Bennett said. "If an individual is not compliant, the state is prepared to take appropriate action."
A day after New York doctor Craig Spencer was diagnosed with Ebola after traveling home from treating Ebola patients in West Africa, the governors of New York and New Jersey announced that they would enforce mandatory quarantines for all travelers who had close contact with Ebola-infected people and were arriving from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone -- the three countries hardest hit by the current epidemic.
Later the same day, IllinoisDepartment of Public Health also announced a mandatory 21-day home quarantine for high-risk individuals who cared for Ebola patients in the same countries.
"This protective measure is too important to be voluntary," Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn said in a statement. "We must take every step necessary to ensure the people of Illinois are protected from potential exposure to the Ebola virus. While we have no confirmed cases of the Ebola virus in Illinois, we will continue to take every safeguard necessary to protect first responders, healthcare workers and the people of Illinois."
Late Sunday night, the governors of New York and New Jersey stressed that they would allow home quarantines with twice-daily monitoring from health officials. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said mandatory hospital quarantines would only be required of high-risk individuals arriving to New York and New Jersey who are not from either of those states.
Florida, Maine, Maryland and Virginia also announced tougher rules for travelers returning from Ebola-affected regions with the possibility of home quarantine.
If anybody can get the way this is being reported and discussed under control in a short period of time, he’s the one.”
NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. health officials are recommending that people who are at highest risk for coming down with Ebola avoid commercial travel or attending large public gatherings, even if they have no symptoms.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued the updated advice to state and local officials on Monday.
The CDC guidance comes after the governors of New York and New Jersey announced mandatory quarantines for medical workers returning from three West African countries plagued by the worst Ebola outbreak in world history. Illinois and Maryland have announced quarantines for health workers at high risk for getting the disease, including anyone who's touched an Ebola patient's body fluids without protective gear.
Previously the CDC has recommended screening of travelers from West Africa and monitoring of people for three weeks after they arrive in the United States.
On Monday, the CDC broke down people in the orbit of Ebola into four categories. Those at highest risk are anyone who's had direct contact with an Ebola patient's body fluids, including health care workers who suffer a needle-stick injury during a patient's care.
To plan for the future, researchers in Michigan went straight to the past. Led by Dr. Howard Markel, director of the University of Michigan Medical School's Center for the History of Medicine, a team of public-health experts evaluated the U.S. response to the world's last great pandemic — the Spanish flu in 1918. The new report, published in the Aug. 8 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, analyzed the public-health measures taken by 43 U.S. cities, all with populations greater than 100,000, during the six months between Sept. 1918 and Feb. 1919. Markel found that cities that early on adopted "old-fashioned," non-pharmaceutical interventions — such as school closures, social-distancing in the community and workplace and quarantine — and "layered" multiple interventions at once for a long period of time fared better than other cities, with slower rates of infection and lower rates of death.
Though Markel's study has just been published, it has already been rolled into policy. The Department of Health and Human Services and CDC finished their analysis of the study's data last December before incorporating it into the Community Strategy for Pandemic Influenza Mitigation, a collection of guidelines for use by individuals and communities issued by the agencies in February. The guide offers help in coordinating and implementing a strategy to protect communities from the front end of an epidemic and to keep them afloat until the appropriate pandemic-strain vaccine can be delivered to them — which officials estimate will be four to six months after the first case is identified.s
1. Swift quarantine and diagnosis. The initial patient in Nigeria, Patrick Sawyer, was isolated immediately. Unlike Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who traveled to Dallas and eventually developed Ebola symptoms and died, Sawyer was seriously ill at the airport. Even when Duncan first showed up sick at the emergency room in Dallas, he was misdiagnosed and sent home for reasons that remain unclear.
Isolation and quarantine help protect the public by preventing exposure to people who have or may have a contagious disease.
Isolation separates sick people with a contagious disease from people who are not sick.
Quarantine separates and restricts the movement of people who were exposed to a contagious disease to see if they become sick.
Twenty U.S. Quarantine Stations, located at ports of entry and land border crossings, use these public health practices as part of a comprehensive Quarantine System that serves to limit the introduction of infectious diseases into the United States and to prevent their spread.
Isolation and quarantine help protect the public by preventing exposure to people who have or may have a contagious disease.
1. Isolation separates sick people with a contagious disease from people who are not sick.
2. Quarantine separates and restricts the movement of people who were exposed to a contagious disease to see if they become sick.
Legal Authorities for Isolation and Quarantine
Understand Quarantine and Isolation
[CDC]
The story was quite different in St. Louis. Two weeks before Philadelphia officials began to react, doctors in St. Louis persuaded the city to require that influenza cases be registered with the health department. And two days after the first civilian cases, police officers helped the department enforce a shutdown of schools, churches and other gathering places. Infected people were quarantined in their homes.
Excess deaths in St. Louis were 347 per 100,000 people, less than half the rate in Philadelphia. Early action appeared to have saved thousands of lives.
The editors say the policy could undermine efforts to contain the international outbreak by discouraging American medical professionals from volunteering in West Africa.
Pennsylvania health authorities were monitoring 105 people Monday for Ebola symptoms, although they would not disclose how many were under travel restrictions or quarantine on arriving from outbreak-ravaged West Africa.
The tally includes everyone in the state known to have arrived in the past three weeks from Guinea, Liberia or Sierra Leone, according to state monitoring rules that took effect this week under a federal directive for six states.
Public health officials could order those with possible Ebola exposure to stay off buses, airplanes and other mass transportation. People with the highest exposure risks could face isolation, the state Department of Health reported.
Still, it resisted the mandatory 21-day quarantines in three states for health care workers who return from the outbreak region, opting instead for a case-by-case approach supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Some health care workers who return to Minnesota after treating Ebola patients in West Africa will be confined to their homes for 21 days — the longest period of time Ebola can incubate in a person.
Gov. Mark Dayton announced the new restrictions Monday after consulting with a team of medical, legal and public health experts over the weekend.
Unlike quarantine policies applied to health care workers in some other states, Minnesota's home confinement policy will apply primarily to travelers who had a known exposure to Ebola.