I feel similarly. A lot of people in the media are blowing it off and making it seem like it's so easy to avoid infection. Glenn Beck made a song about Ebola w

I feel similarly. A lot of people in the media are blowing it off and making it seem like it's so easy to avoid infection. Glenn Beck made a song about Ebola with advice including "Don’t lick vomit off the street." Sure, it's Glenn Beck writing a stupid song, but I get the same reaction from other places. Stephen Colbert interviewed an infection specialist who said, "The only way to get infected is to touch that blood barehanded or smear it on your face." Technically true I suppose, but the implication is that only crazy people could contract this. It's clearly not true. Healthcare workers make up 10% of the deaths in this outbreak. And this article you posted isn't reassuring at all. The graph at the top appears comforting, until you read the footnote: >The R0 is integrated over the time that a person is infectious to others. For HIV, this could be years. But for Ebola, that time is only about a week. So even though they have similar R0s, Ebola's infections per unit of time is much higher than HIV's. So you should expect the number of cases to double roughly ever week? Super. Looking at the WHO estimates, it's closer to once a month (1 week contagious + 21 day incubation period I suppose), but that's still pretty terrifying, since 20 more months at that rate would be the world's population. To be clear, I'm not making any claims about how this will play out, but only demonstrating bewilderment at how that article is supposed to be reassuring. I'm willing to accept the claims that our healthcare system can easily contain this, but I really don't understand the sentiment that it's not very contagious.