NEW YORK — A nurse who is being quarantined at a New Jersey hospital after working with Ebola patients in Sierra Leone criticized her treatment Saturday as an overreaction after an initial test found that she did not have the virus.
“I am scared about how health care workers will be treated at airports when they declare that they have been fighting Ebola in West Africa,” the nurse, Kaci Hickox, wrote in an essay on the website of The Dallas Morning News, in collaboration with a friend who works for the paper.
“I am scared that, like me, they will arrive and see a frenzy of disorganization, fear, and most frightening, quarantine,” Hickox said.
She described having been held in isolation for about seven hours at Newark Liberty International Airport on Friday, left alone for long stretches, and given only a granola bar when she said she was hungry.
Hickox, 33, was placed in quarantine under a new policy announced Friday by the governors of New York and New Jersey. Under the new rule, all people entering the country through Newark and Kennedy airports are being quarantined for 21 days if they had direct contact with Ebola patients in Guinea, Liberia, or Sierra Leone, even if they show no symptoms of infection.
On Friday night, New Jersey health officials said the nurse had developed a fever after landing, but on Saturday, they said her blood had tested negative for Ebola. Additional tests will be conducted to confirm the finding.
Hickox disputed that she had had a fever. She wrote that at the airport, a forehead scanner showed her temperature to be 101, but that came after four hours during which she had not been allowed to leave.
“My cheeks were flushed, I was upset at being held with no explanation,” she wrote. “The female officer looked smug. ‘You have a fever now,’ she said.”
She was eventually escorted by eight police cars to the hospital and taken to a tent outside the building. An oral thermometer showed her temperature to be 98, she wrote. A forehead scan taken around the same time read 101, she wrote, suggesting that it was not a reliable instrument to determine fever.
She wrote that the doctor felt her neck and rechecked the temperature. “‘There’s no way you have a fever,’ he said. ‘Your face is just flushed.’ ”
Her complaints served as a broadside against the new quarantine policy, which goes beyond recommendations from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The new policy has raised concerns among some health experts and doctors that it will discourage people from going to West Africa to try to contain Ebola at its source.
The World Health Organization reported Saturday that there are more than 10,000 suspected or confirmed cases in the three hardest-hit countries.
The CDC calls for self-monitoring for travelers who have had contact with Ebola patients, but not isolation, because a patient is not believed to be contagious until symptoms appear. CDC officials said that states had the right to go beyond its recommendations.
On Saturday, in a sign of growing concern about the virus, Governor Pat Quinn of Illinois, the home of another major travel hub, O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, instituted a quarantine program similar to the one in place in New York and New Jersey.
New Jersey officials did not immediately respond Saturday to the nurse’s complaints about her treatment and about the policy. The CDC, which is involved with the monitoring of travelers at the airport, did not immediately answer questions about how she was handled.
The governors of New York and New Jersey issued their order on Friday, the day after Dr. Craig Spencer, a New York City resident who had worked in Guinea, tested positive for Ebola.
New Jersey health officials did not say how long Hickox was to be kept at University Hospital in Newark.
A hospital spokeswoman, Stacie Newton, said the nurse was in an extended treatment area, “in a building that’s part of the hospital.”