For more than two weeks, government officials from President Obama on down have been urging Americans to stay calm and not get into a needless panic over Ebola: They know how to handle it, they've got it covered, it's not spread that easily, our communicable disease specialists are the best in the world.
Then Dr. Tom Frieden, who heads the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the fight against the disease will be a long one because the virus keeps changing. He said the only outbreak he has seen resembling the current one is AIDS, and the world community must “work hard so this is not the next AIDS.”
Such contradictory messages might be why, in a country that has thousands of deaths each year from the flu, people are panicking over something that has so far killed one person in this country, someone who was infected not here but in Africa. A police officer who entered the place where the infected man was staying thought he had symptoms but tested negative.
About 200 airline cabin cleaners walked off the job in New York. “We are always with feces and near garbage,” one of them said. Ebola is said to be spread only through direct contact with bodily fluid. A passenger on a US Airways flight to the Dominican Republic joked about having Ebola, and the plane was met by four men in hazmat suits.
The Obama administration continued to resist the calls for banning travel from the three West African countries where the virus is most prevalent, but it did decide to start “screening” passengers from there at five major airports by having them fill out questionnaires and taking their temperatures. This did not reassure the American public.
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