NEW YORK — 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, Governor Chris Christie dismissed questions about 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 Christie and Governor Andrew M. Cuomo of New York announced Friday.
One of Hickox’s lawyers, Steven Hyman, said she had been released midday on Monday from University Hospital in Newark.
A hospital spokeswoman said that two black sport utility vehicles with tinted windows were headed to Hickox’s home state of 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.
Fort Kent, Maine, where Hickox lives, is on the northern border across from New Brunswick, Canada. It is about 640 miles from Newark, more than a 10-hour car ride.
A real estate broker contacted there on Monday afternoon said that the town was buzzing about Hickox’s imminent arrival, and that people did not seem to know whether there would be a public danger if she were to develop the disease.
The town is small, Mike Albert said, and there is only one hospital. “If anyone has any type of emergency, that’s where they’ll go,” he said.
In a separate development Monday, New York health officials said a 5-year-old boy who recently returned to New York City from the West African nation of Guinea tested negative for Ebola after he was taken to the hospital with symptoms consistent with the disease.
The child was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center on Sunday night by emergency medical workers outfitted in protective gear and immediately placed in isolation. The people who lived with him were immediately ordered quarantined in their apartment, but those orders were lifted after the test results were released.
Hickox’s departure from Newark capped a whirlwind four days in which the nurse criticized Christie’s quarantine policy, hired a legal team to defend her civil rights, and had the governor defending a policy that he announced in association with Cuomo.
The details of that quarantine seem to have evolved in both states since Friday.
“I didn’t reverse any decision,” Christie said from the Brevard Zoo in Melbourne, Fla., where he was campaigning for that state’s governor, Rick Scott, a fellow Republican.
“She hadn’t had any symptoms for 24 hours. And she tested negative for Ebola. So there was no reason to keep her,’’ he said. “The reason she was put into the hospital in the first place was because she was running a high fever and was symptomatic.”
After Hickox landed at Newark Liberty International Airport on Friday, a forehead scan showed she had a temperature of 101, which prompted concern because fever is a symptom of the Ebola virus. Hickox later said that the reading came because she was flushed and upset. A later reading taken with an oral thermometer recorded a normal temperature of 98.6.
“If people are symptomatic, they go into the hospital,” Christie said. “If they live in New Jersey, they can get quarantined at home. If they don’t, and they’re not symptomatic, then we set up quarantine for them out of state. But if they are symptomatic, they’re going to the hospital.”
On Sunday, Cuomo, a Democrat, relaxed New York’s mandatory quarantine, allowing health care workers who live in New York to be at home and to be compensated for lost income.
But Christie remained adamant that there had been reason to quarantine Hickox in a tent equipped with a portable toilet but no shower or television.
“She was obviously ill enough that the CDC and medical officials hospitalized her and gave her an Ebola test,” Christie said Monday. “They don’t do that just for fun.”
Christie said he knew that Hickox was “upset and angry; she wanted to go home.”
“But she needs to understand that the obligation of elected officials is to protect the public health of all the people, and if that inconvenienced her for a period of time, that’s what we need to do to protect the public. That’s what we’ll continue to do,” he said.
Governor Paul R. LePage of Maine said Monday that the state had worked out protocols for health care workers who are returning from Africa.
“We certainly understand health care workers’ desire to get home after doing good work in West Africa,” said LePage, a Republican. “But we must be vigilant in our duty to protect the health and safety of all Mainers, as well as anyone who may come in contact with someone who has been exposed to Ebola.”
The Maine Department of Health and Human Service’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention said its policy would be to collaborate with an affected person to establish a quarantine at home for 21 days after the last possible exposure to the virus.