The US Federal government announced a set of monitoring guidelines for people returning from West Africa, where Ebola has killed some 5,000 people in a devastating epidemic.  It comes after the conservative governor of New Jersey backed down and allowed an uninfected nurse out of a mandatory quarantine.

“We believed these are based on science.  These add a strong level of protection,” said Dr. Thomas Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC is recommending that returning heath care workers, or people who had been near Ebola patients, should submit to an in-person checkup and a phone call from a local public health authority which will monitor their conditions.  But the agency does not have regulatory authority, and it’s up to states and municipalities to enforce the guidelines.  Some – like New York State, New Jersey, and Illinois – have already adopted stricter rules, which wound up in political embarrassment.

New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie’s mandatory 21-day quarantine for all returning healthcare workers from the epidemic zone snagged nurse Kaci Hickox – even though she showed no symptoms and tested negative for the virus.  She wasn’t confined to a hospital’s isolation unit – she was stuck in a tent on the grounds of a hospital with no shower, no plans for her meals, and an improvised latrine for a toilet right there in the tent.

The idea that an American without a disease can be forcibly detained without due process and subjected to ridiculous conditions struck even America’s right-leaning corporate news industry as horrid.  Hickox retained a prominent civil liberties attorney, and the White House criticized the nurse’s detention. 

Bad publicity followed, and many accused Christie of mistreating heroes who used their personal vacation time to go to West Africa and fight a killer epidemic.  Christie eventually agreed to let Kaci Hickox go to her home in another state and self-quarantine.  Christie denied caving in, but it’s going to be a big stain on his expected presidential bid in 2016.

“She hadn’t had any symptoms for 24 hours.  And she tested negative for Ebola.  So there was no reason to keep her.  The reason she was put into the hospital in the first place was because she was running a high fever and was symptomatic,” Christie said.  But it was never true – Hickox at no time ran a high fever and never was symptomatic.  And Christie repeated this falsehood, even though it had already been denied by Hickox and her doctors.

New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo also backed off his identical quarantine orders a bit, agreeing to home quarantines and monitoring – effectively throwing Christie under the bus.  Other states had come up with other rules, while waiting for CDC guidance.

“We found that health departments generally do follow CDC guidelines,” said the CDC’s Dr. Freiden.  “If they wish them to be more stringent, that is within their authority.”