In the month since a Liberian man infected with Ebola traveled to Dallas, where he later died, the nation has marinated in a murky soup of understandable concern, wild misinformation, political opportunism and garden-variety panic.
Within the escalating debate over how to manage potential threats to public health — muddled by what is widely viewed as a bungled effort by government officials and the Dallas hospital that managed the first case of Ebola diagnosed in the United States — the line between vigilance and hysteria can be as blurry as the edges of a watercolor painting.
A crowd of parents last week pulled their children out of a Mississippi middle school after learning that its principal had traveled to Zambia, an African nation untouched by the disease.
On the eve of midterm elections with control of the United States Senate at stake, politicians from both parties are calling for the end of commercial air traffic between the United States and some African countries, even though most public health experts and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said a shutdown would compound rather than alleviate the risks.
Carolyn Smith of Louisville, Ky., last week took a rare break from sequestering herself at home to take her fiancé to a doctor’s appointment. She said she was reluctant to leave her house after hearing that a nurse from the Dallas hospital had flown to Cleveland, over 300 miles from her home. “We’re not really going anywhere if we can help it,” Ms. Smith, 50, said.
The panic in some way mirrors what followed the anthrax attacks of 2001 and the West Nile virus outbreak in New York City in 1999. But fed by social media and the 24-hour news cycle, the first American experience with Ebola has become a lesson in the ways things that go viral electronically can be as potent and frightening as those that do so biologically. The result has ignited a national deliberation about the conflicts between public health interest, civil liberties and common sense.
“This is sort of comparable to when people were killed in terror attacks,” said Roxane Cohen Silver, a professor of psychology in the department of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine.
Ms. Silver studied and wrote about people who heavily consumed media after the bombings at the Boston Marathon in 2013 and “what we found is that individuals who were exposed to a great deal of media within the first week reported more acute stress than did people who were actually at the marathon.”
In his work on panic in various disasters, Anthony Mawson, a visiting professor in the School of Health Sciences at Jackson State University in Mississippi, found that while physical danger is presumed to lead to mass panic, in actual physical emergencies “expressions of mutual aid are common and often predominate.” But the threat of an illness that has infected only two people in the United States appears to have had the opposite effect, inciting a widespread desire to hide and shut things down.
“Obviously there’s fear,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in an interview Sunday on ABC. He said fear of the disease is dramatically outstripping current risks. “We always get caught when we say zero,” he said. “Nothing is zero. It’s extraordinarily low, much less than the risk of many other things which happens to them in their lives.”
The health care system, which has urged calm, has at times sent mixed messages that can promote fear. “There are two elements to trust,” said Baruch Fischhoff, a professor of decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon. “One is competence and one is honesty. The hospital in Dallas changed its story three times. So while most people know there are very few cases and this is not an easily transmissible virus, they also know the human system for managing this is imperfect, and they don’t know whether they are getting the straight story about it.”
Republicans, finding both public health and political messages, have made a similar case against the government response.
“If this was one incidence where people thought the government wasn’t doing what the government was supposed to do, it would be much less of a reaction than we see now, where there’s this long list of the government being one step behind, whether it’s the border, the IRS, the Secret Service,” Senator Roy D. Blunt, Republican of Missouri, said on “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “Now this health concern is more real than it would be if there wasn’t a sense that the government is just not being managed in a way that people would want it to be managed.”
With fear riding high, Democrats, particularly those running for office, have supported a travel ban.
“Although stopping the spread of this virus overseas will require a large, coordinated effort with the international community,” said Senator Kay Hagan of North Carolina, a Democrat in a tight race, “a temporary travel ban is a prudent step the president can take to protect the American people.”
As is often the case in contemporary American life, parents have been at the forefront of the concerns.
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In Mississippi, the middle-school principal who attended a funeral in Zambia was declared healthy by the C.D.C., but he still agreed to take a paid vacation to quell fears. There was no parallel panic over Enterovirus D68, which has infected at least two young children in the state.
Also last week, a teacher at an elementary school in Strong, Me., was placed on a 21-day paid leave when parents told the school board that they were worried he had been exposed to Ebola during a trip to Dallas for an educational conference.
On its website, the Maine district explained that though it had no evidence to support a leave, “the district and the staff member understand the parents’ concerns. Therefore, after several discussions with the staff member, out of an abundance of caution, this staff member has been placed on a paid leave.” In Rock Island, Ill., a Liberian immigrant named Barhyeau Philips said he and his family would be confined to their home for the next few weeks in a voluntary quarantine, unable to go to work or send a child to high school, because of the community response to the arrival of his 21-year-old daughter, Jennifer, from Liberia.
Fear has also manifested itself in commerce. Julian Goldberg, who owns an Army goods store in downtown Louisville, said several acquaintances had urged him to start selling protective gear along with military clothing and equipment. “I hate to see the nation in a state of fright,” he said. “But Ebola was not born yesterday. Even if it had to swim across the ocean, it was going to get here somehow.”
Several schools in the Dallas area closed last week to do deep cleanings after school officials learned that parents of some of the children had been aboard a Frontier Airlines flight with Amber Joy Vinson, one of the two nurses who became infected with the virus after treating the Liberian patient, Thomas Eric Duncan.
Ryan Galloway, whose son is in third grade at Lake Pointe Elementary in Dallas, said he believed that at least half the children stayed home from school Thursday.
“It’s not really much of a crazy, afraid panic where everybody is hiding in their homes like a zombie apocalypse,” he said. “Everybody is not wanting their children to be exposed, obviously, and they are expressing concern, but I wouldn’t say there is crazed panic.”
At the apartment complex where Ms. Vinson lives in Dallas, Tara Wagner, a children’s behavioral therapist, said she saw one resident don a mask. “I thought that it was a sign of ignorance,” said Ms. Wagner, 25, adding that she was bothered that residents from other states seemed to be demonizing Dallas. “I think the hysteria is coming from other cities,” she said. “I am kind of like, ‘Y’all don’t even live here!’ ”