If they are sneezing and coughing, I suspect they have some kind of respiratory virus. Since Ebola is a bloodborne pathogen, I a) wouldn't expect an Ebola patient to be sneezing and coughing a lot, and b) wouldn't expect virus to be present unless they are expelling bloody fluids.
This paper (Bausch et al., J Infect Disease 2007; 196:S142–7) shows results of testing of various bodily fluids of acute and convalescent patients. Most of the samples did not contain virus.
Furthermore, the airflow in a plane minimizes the amount of air that is in contact with more than one passenger. I just read about that the other day. The air is sucked out from the bottom... that plane is almost like a laminar flow hood. So I do not have much concern about droplet transmission in the air on a plane... droplets on surfaces in the bathroom are another issue.
Contact with contaminated surfaces is insidious and almost impossible to avoid. If a virus can survive for a few hours while encapsulated in a fomite or droplet, it can find a new host.
The treatment facilities use bleach solutions to disinfect surfaces every day and as needed. Fomites become a problem when those infected with Ebola do not go to the hospital. People are avoiding the hospital--which could explain (at least in part) why this outbreak keeps on going.
What saves people is that most viruses degrade rapidly when they are dried and exposed to sunlight and air. Also, virus have a fairly high failure rate to bind to host cells, so it take lot of them (several thousand virons) to get an infection started.
In the case of Ebola, we do not know very well how durable the virus is, since the studies have not been done. However, Ebola is extremely infectious; the ID50, I seem to recall, is about 10 virions. Someone once told me that the LD50 is about half a virion, which I really do not understand, since there is a difficulty trying to obtain half a virion and it is questionable about how infectious half a virion can be.
The new Ebola strains appear to have more effective binding mechanisms (they are more infectious), and survive longer in fomites or droplets. Patients may be shedding contagious levels of virus earlier in the course of their disease too.
We are still dealing with Ebola Zaire, the same strain we have known for decades, although the clade is "new". This particular outbreak is less deadly than some past outbreaks. The reason it keeps spreading is probably related to human behavior, not virus characteristics.
This is the key behavioral change to watch for.
Ebola virus is already known to be excreted in sweat, tears, vaginal fluids, and semen.
The question then is "how early in the course of the infection does contagious shedding start?". My guess is that it starts earlier in the course of the infection than it once did.
Also - "How long does the virus survive outside a host?". Again, my guess is that the answer is "longer than previous strains did".
These questions can be definitively answered by bioweapons researchers. They probably already know the answers. (Who do you suppose was already developing those experimental drugs to resist Ebola?)
In any event, the behavior of the epidemic will answer the questions.
What next?
And you just stated in response to Flamberge:
Contact with contaminated surfaces is insidious and almost impossible to avoid. If a virus can survive for a few hours while encapsulated in a fomite or droplet, it can find a new host."Fomites become a problem when those infected with Ebola do not go to the hospital. People are avoiding the hospital--which could explain (at least in part) why this outbreak keeps on going."
You just admitted that buildings can be contaminated by Ebola! People are at risk of contracting Ebola by entering Ebola-contaminated buildings, which can be grocery stores. I am an old Cold War civil defense guy and fully understand the implications of that.
The quarantine measures necessary to contain a significant Ebola outbreak in the U.S., absent widespread availability of an effective vaccine and/or treatment, will entail cessation of economic activity in the affected areas. This will have vast economic and financial effects. There will also be widespread panic which will have similar effects outside the affected areas.
This means likely economic and financial apocalypse countrywide should there be a significant Ebola outbreak in this country. Even in the absence of demographically significant fatalities.
That I understand too. Bill Quick has outlined a very possible scenario for such a financial apocalypse in the 2/3 of the U.S. not devastated by the fictional EMP pulse in his novel, _Lightning Fall_.