Ebola Nurse Should Stop Acting Like Petulant Child

Nurse Kaci Hickox Hires Lawyer to Get Her out of Ebola Quarantine

I'm sure being in quarantine is an inconvenience for Kaci Hickox, the American nurse who arrived from Ebola-stricken Sierra Leone.  She now finds herself under a mandatory quarantine, is indignant and has hired a civil rights lawyer to spring her loose.

But this woman really needs to calm down.  For, all this hollering about the infringement of her civil rights is doing is confirming the low opinion that Americans had already begun to form (perhaps unfairly) about this new generation of American health care workers.  It is regrettable that what we've seen since this Ebola crisis erupted in our midst has been the self-absorbed, irresponsible behavior of teenagers.   They have, no doubt, the requisite empirical skills needed to have obtained medical licenses, but as for maturity, or concern for others, now that's another matter altogether.



 We had one nurse who was suffering symptoms of early-stage Ebola.   Despite being ill, she had wedding plans to arrange so hopped on a commercial flight to Ohio, shopped at a bridal salon, returned to Dallas, and was admitted the next day to a Texas hospital's isolation ward.  The bridal shop had to be closed down temporarily, as public health officials worked to track down others who might have visited the shop.  Passengers on both flights were also tracked and monitored.

As this drama was playing itself out, we learned that another healthcare worker, who was supposed to be voluntarily quarantining herself, was on a cruise liner in the Caribbean.  That situation sparked several international diplomatic crises, when the countries of Belize and Mexico refused to allow the ship to dock, for fear of exposing their citizens to the dreaded disease.

Next up was a doctor, who had just returned to the U.S. after treating Ebola patients in Guinea.  In fact, the young man lied on the form he was required to fill out before leaving Guinea, in which he stated not having had contact with anyone infected with Ebola in the past 21 days.  He told the same fib when he reached the United States, took several subways around New York city, and then went bowling with friends.  The next day he had to be hospitalized in an isolation unit with Ebola.

Nurse Hickox, having missed all the drama at home, was understandably not prepared for the mandatory quarantine.  But there wouldn't have been one, had the medical doctor returning from Guinea last week, self-quarantined in his apartment, rather than giving Americans the distinct impression that our health care workers returning from the affected areas of West Africa can clearly not be trusted to quarantine themselves.