No offence, but have you ever worked in a research lab or even been inside one? I can think of a whole host of dangers that exist in the research laboratory that you will never see in a patient care environment. One of the worst students I had was a physician--not just because teaching some level of arrogance seems to be part of clinician training, but because it was really hard, thanks to her medical training, to get her to understand how careful she needed to be to work in a lab.
You seem to think that a lab is a benign environment. The truth is, labs are dangerous--and not just because of the pathogens and toxins we work with, but also because of the equipment and chemicals. People get seriously injured and killed in labs fairly frequently (google "laboratory deaths"). Chemicals and equipment explode. Animals bite (and they have razor sharp teeth). Most of the procedures required to analyze pathogens generate aerosols. Some chemicals are deadly if you get them on your skin, others if you breathe them. And so on. I'm pretty sure I could discuss a different laboratory danger every day for the next year and not run out of topics.
Everything I have said about Ebola mostly pertains to the laboratory and healthcare settings. I actually do not consider Ebola much of a concern "in the wild" because the disease is so debilitating that by the time a person becomes contagious, they don't feel like doing anything. Most people who have fevers and abdominal pain, are vomiting and who have severe diarrhea really don't feel like going bowling or whatever. So their house might be contaminated, but that's about it. Even in Africa, at the heart of this outbreak, where they have cultural practices that facilitate the spread of the disease, the R-naught is still less than 2.
How about if someone who is asymptomatic donates blood? Did you bother thinking about that. The chances are remote and close to none that a person from Africa will give blood, assuming they are honest, given the malaria risk, but had one of those nurses given blood during their asymptomatic period, are you sure about that?
People take precautions out of a knowledge that accidents and acts of stupidity can and do happen. I work in a lab to, I dealt with soil microbes and fungi that could be extremely dangerous even if you are vaccinated, even worse I could carry something out of the lab that I am immune to and unaffected by, but others around me could be killed or harmed by it. I am pretty well aware of how microbiological experiments work, I also understand that when you are dealing with something that unless it is in extremely large colonies is simply too small for you to see, or can be extremely hard to kill, extreme caution is fully justified. A lot of these people aren’t assuming the strawman idea that a virus is magic, but a lot of everyday people are aware that in the face of unknowns, extreme caution is highly justified.