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NEW YORK — The gulf between politicians and scientists over Ebola widened Sunday as the nation’s top infectious-disease expert warned that the mandatory, 21-day quarantining of medical workers returning from West Africa is unnecessary and could discourage volunteers from traveling to the danger zone.

“The best way to protect us is to stop the epidemic in Africa, and we need those health care workers. So we do not want to put them in a position where it makes it very, very uncomfortable for them to even volunteer to go,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Meanwhile, Kaci Hickox, the first nurse forcibly quarantined in New Jersey under the state’s new policy, said in a telephone interview with CNN that her isolation at a hospital was “inhumane,” adding: “We have to be very careful about letting politicians make health decisions.”

The New York Times reported that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Sunday night outlined a revised quarantine policy for health care workers. Under the new guidelines, the state would allow all returning health care workers who have had contact with Ebola patients but have no symptoms to return to their homes, where they would be confined; their health would be monitored for 21 days, The Times reported.

Saying the federal health guidelines are inadequate, Cuomo and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie had announced on Friday a mandatory quarantine program for medical workers and other arriving airline passengers who have had contact with Ebola victims in West Africa, and Illinois and Florida soon followed suit. Twenty-one days is the incubation period for Ebola.

Christie on Sunday defended quarantining as necessary to protect the public and predicted it “will become a national policy sooner rather than later.”

“I don’t believe when you’re dealing with something as serious as this that we can count on a voluntary system,” said Christie, who is expected to run for the Republican nomination for president in 2016. He added: “I absolutely have no second thoughts about it.”

The Obama administration considers the policy”not grounded in science” and conveyed its concerns to Christie and Cuomo, a senior administration official said.

Fauci made the rounds on five major Sunday morning talk shows to argue that policy should be driven by science — and that science says people with the virus are not contagious until symptoms appear. And even then, infection requires direct contact with bodily fluids.

He said that close monitoring of medical workers for symptoms is sufficient, and warned that forcibly separating them from others, or quarantining them, for three weeks could cripple the fight against the outbreak in West Africa — an argument that humanitarian medical organizations have made.