Those who were quarantined spoke in interviews of lost wages, stress and fear.

Ms. Skrip said the experience spurred memories of previous trauma in her life. “To be quarantined, that’s like my worst nightmare,” she said. “To be tracked and alone in a space. It was incredibly hard just getting through that.”

Maria Lavandier Bouffard, Yale’s director of emergency management, was the only person who regularly visited Ms. Skrip during her two-week quarantine. She took out her garbage through a window, emptied her mailbox, and moved her car to avoid parking tickets. She also visited Mr. Boyko and said she worried about the students’ physical and mental health.

The students were not even free to leave for a fire alarm. Unless there was an imminent threat to their lives, they were to call the New Haven emergency dispatchers and work out an evacuation plan. “I don’t think people get how complex it is,” Ms. Bouffard said.

Dr. Jewel Mullen, Connecticut’s public health commissioner, who signed the students’ quarantine orders, defended the state’s rules. “We were developing policies to address a scenario that we had never encountered before in our country.”

Dr. Nancy Snyderman, then an NBC journalist who had been in Liberia, across a room from a cameraman a day before he developed Ebola symptoms, was initially asked by her local health department in New Jersey to stay away from large gatherings, monitor herself for fever, and notify a health officer of her movements, according to an official document. But she was formally quarantined by the state after residents reported seeing her in her car getting takeout food — appearing to contradict her statement that she would voluntarily “self-quarantine out of an abundance of caution.”

Dr. Snyderman was excoriated, mocked and threatened on social media. “#NancySnyderman: the Typhoid Mary of #Ebola,” wrote @deptofdave, in a Twitter comment that was milder than many. Fliers went up in Princeton with the names of her children and what someone thought was her home address.

“It was scary,” Dr. Snyderman said in an interview. “I realized during that crazy time maybe we haven’t moved the needle enough on the public’s trust of science.”