If you do have sex with someone with HIV it's about 99.9% that you won't get it. Ebola is more like 1000x worse.
Ebola is vastly more infectious than HIV. With HIV you basically need to get blood with a viral load injected to have any certainty of getting it. Transmission rates with vaginal intercourse are in the rates of far below 1% per act. More than half the pregnancies don't even transmit the virus to the baby.
Compare that with Ebola where the virus is in basically present in infectious levels in every bodily fluid spread around to the extent that hospital personnel don't even know how they got it.
HIV, lick it, you'll still be fine. Ebola, touch anything they've touched and all bets are off.
Having enough food for a week or two so you don't have to go out and infect other people even with the flu is merely common sense and decency towards your fellow citizens. Or are you one of those people who go around sneezing on the fresh produce, right before going 'ooooh, look, sale on bush meat and people looking at the stand aren't bleeding out of their ears so I'll throw a neighbourhood jungle-themed party!'?
There's a difference between stocking up on half a decade of preserves and ammo and making reasonably sure you're not going to be part of the problem in a possible contagious situation, until government can catch up to dealing with possible misjudged situations. I'll do my part to keep from infecting others and not becoming a sudden logistics issue, and I hope most others do as well, particularly when such precautions are part of what one should normally do even without any possible serious contagion.
Yes there are, and those people at the CDC know exactly what I just said. And now they're pretty much doing exactly that in Sierra Leone and yes, sending people home with a Tylenol and a bottle of electrolytes and telling them not to touch their family is _exactly_ the plan in the west if we get significant spread here. The cold logic of a disease who's symptoms are so similar to so many others in the contagious phase and for which basically nothing can be done leads to the impossible situation where concentrating the sick will increase spread rather than decrease it.
It's not that they need more chances to 'solve the problem', it's that within the boundaries of currently available options, the problem has no solution.
The only game changer would be a cure or good treatment option. Outside that it's shutting down any indication of spread with an iron fist at once, before the sequence of immutable logic catches hold, because after that it's dice and electrolytes.
But no, I'm not particularly worried about Ebola as there really isn't any point. The major issue that makes Ebola different from many other diseases is the demoralizing aspect it will have on healthcare workers due to its deadliness and lack of treatments and they'll have hard choices to make, but even if worst comes to worst there wasn't much they could do and even that will pass as recovering infectees will be able to pick things up. It's not going to wipe out civilization and life goes on.
So either we'll get a cure in time or we won't, but if we don't, do stock up on food so you have enough to lock yourself in a room for a week or two if you feel symptoms. You probably wont have it, but don't spread it to anyone else if you do.
And for exactly that reason, the CDC experts won't be telling you what I just told you, because there isn't much point in doing that until it's necessary.
Easy to contain?
Say you have a breakout and spread among the US population. The emergency room starts getting people with fever and stomach ache. What do you do? Put them in quarantine? Fine.
Ok, now we've exhausted the 10 beds at the hospital that are usable for quarantine. We've still got 150 patients with symptoms in the emergency room. Put them all in the same room? Maybe only one or two have ebola. Can't put them in one room, then they'll all get ebola if a few had it. No rooms for individual isolation. Send them home? Violations of curfews will be common, police won't be itching to babysit every emergency room visitor. That won't contain it once we're reaching that number of cases.
Now we know there's 150 patients with potential ebola. That will get us another 5000 patients with the symptoms in the emergency room. Quarantine them? No place. Send them home? And we go another round.
There is no way western medicine has any chance at all to contain any sustained outbreak. It isn't a matter of knowing how to prevent spread, it's a matter of sheer numbers making those measures ineffective and the fact that potential patients will know that most hospitals can't do anything for more than a few patients with sepsis at a time which means that you're better off hydrating at home, hoping you don't actually have ebola and not risking getting exposed to other possible ebola infectees in an emergency room.
To have a serious chance at containment after any significant breakout removes travel history as a useful major red-flag there will have to be really good treatment or a cure or the rational choice for any individual having the fairly common symptoms simply won't be to go to the hospital.
After something like 20 years I finally found a system that won't run Debian unstable right now. My Panasonic Toughpad FZ-G1 magnesium tablet + iKey Jumpseat magnesium keyboard. Systemd and GDM break. Bought (for less than full price) because I am a frequent traveler and speaker and really do need something you can drop from 6 feet and pour coffee over have it keep working.
But because of this bug I have ubuntu at the moment, and am not having fun and am eager to return to Debian.
Variables don't; constants aren't.