IMHO the presser was full of lies and half truths designed to keep us happy until things get so bad they can not be hidden any longer. Alarmist? Not hardly Pilgrim.
Read Wikipedia’s article on the Spanish Flu - a world wide pandemic from the 1918-1920 era. One of the points made in the article was that the initial impact was down played to keep from alarming the people, after all we were fighting the war to end all wars to make the world safe for democracy.
The moment I heard that the hospital and CDC were not aggressively back tracking the man’s activities for the last 10 days I knew there was no reason to listen any more.
If you are going to contain a pandemic you must first identify patent zero - the first infected person. That has been done. Now you need to identify everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, who has been in contact with him while he was infectious. Each of them must be tested for Ebola. Any one who tests positive needs to isolated and then the same level of background searches made on that one(s). Then keep repeating until you run out positive test results.
Failure to identify, isolate and treat all people exposed to patent Zero creates a new patent zero and all that that entails.
I am thankful we live in a time when we can email and communicate with each other in minutes and tracking the people will not be difficult.