I am really sick and tired of the scaremongering about the two Ebola patients who are coming back to the US. One's already here. I've seen the pics of the isolation units they'll be flown back in, and I know pretty much what the isolation rooms in the hospitals are like. They are negative pressure rooms like they use for TB patients, and very secure. They look pretty much like space capsules, and the docs and nurses who tend to the patients will be garbed in something like space suits. Ebola is transmitted primarily via direct contact with blood and bodily fluids, and the patients who are being flown back may have got it by something as small as a tear in a glove that went unnoticed, or by contact outside the hospital with someone who had the virus, which would be easy enough in West Africa…not here.
There's a lot of misunderstanding too about a doctor who was flown back to Tennessee and was told to stay at home because he worked with these folks. He has been on virtual house arrest…well, quarantined to his house…since July 19, but is completely asymptomatic and in my understanding has tested negative for the virus. Quarantine will be lifted after 21 days. I know this doctor pretty well. He used to be my kids' pediatrician, and later on I worked with him. Since he retired he's been a volunteer with Medical Teams International and I admire him a lot. He'll go where he's needed. Anyway, he's not dangerous and people need to stop freaking out and also stop treating his daughter, who picked him up at the airport, like some kind of leper.
Please, folks, be reasonable and listen. Stop freaking, okay? You are in a lot more danger of getting hit by a truck than you are from two people who got very sick while trying to help others and who are going to be in very secure isolation, let alone from someone who worked there and has shown no signs of the disease since he got home, or from his daughter who picked him up at the airport. You have far more serious things to worry about.