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.
Thank you for your expertise too.
As for how to treat healthcare workers who return from hot spots, I fully support any honors that can be showered on them and maximum comfort/entertainment/dining/what-have-you during their isolation/quarantine.
You can go "what if... what if?" all day long, and bring up any number of highly improbable scenarios. The fact is, freak occurrences happen all the time. Do you ever read the MMWR--the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report--posted on the CDC website? There are articles about the improbable events pretty frequently there. But in reality, risk management is about identifying the most likely event, analyzing it to determine if it represents a tolerable level of risk, and taking steps to mitigate the risk to a tolerable level. More people in the United States have developed fatal cases of rabies from organ donations than have gotten Ebola from blood transfusions.
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.
For the most part, the reason these are unknowns is that, until recently, most people weren't even aware of Ebola and they know nothing about it. It is not a strawman to point out that many of the... beliefs, for lack of better word... they express about Ebola are not attributes of any virus. For instance, the insistence that Ebola can somehow penetrate properly used PPE. No virus can do that. Therefore, it is a magic belief. Or the belief that Ebola can go airborne--which, if people knew anything about viral biology, they would understand is nearly impossible. And so on. Ebola really is not a supernatural entity that has all of the fantastic powers attributed to it, it is a virus that isn't even that hardy and certainly isn't very transmissible.