“It’s funny,” said Ms. Haller, 44, a former technology executive who is running for City Council. “I’m not allowed to let people into the house, but I’m allowed in and out of the house.”

Ms. Berkowitz, 46, who works at a museum in New York City, expressed a similar sentiment.

“I could go to work tomorrow,” she said. “I think that’s weird. It seems extreme on one end and ‘Eh, just a precaution’ on the other.”

Late Sunday, the principal at the private school that Ms. Haller’s four children attend, Salanter Akiba Riverdale Academy, which has been closed since last Tuesday, sent an email to parents acknowledging the confusion.

“Thank you for your patience as we continue to wait to hear back from the New York State Department of Health with clearly written quarantine guidelines,” the principal, Rabbi Binyamin Krauss, wrote. “We know that many of you are awaiting clarification and answers.”

Rather than continue to wait, several parents at the school who are also doctors distributed their own guidelines for quarantined students and parents, addressing many of the questions the state has yet to answer.

Rabbi Krauss said that he, too, had sometimes been left to wonder about the most basic questions. “Even the fact of whether I should be quarantined has not been consistent,” he said.

There were also more prosaic quandaries.

“Can we take out the trash?” asked the daughter of one of the women from the cruise, who put herself in precautionary quarantine after days of trying to get a straight answer from the health authorities on whether to do so. “Can we go in our backyard?” The woman, like her mother, spoke on the condition that her name not be published.