To put the risk to passengers on Vinson's flight in perspective, consider Patrick Sawyer

[Yo_Mama]

7. A good post, but isn't the problem really the logistics?

First, i agree that Vinson's flight was low risk.

The problem is that to deal with Ebola, the contact tracing has to be very thorough. So now, to take very low risk to no-risk, we have a cast of additional hundreds.

The problem is that when you have a couple hundred really low-risk exposures, the net risk isn't low risk any more.

Apparently the CDC is now contacting the passengers from the first plane flight, because they suspect (probably based on her blood viral count) that she was ill earlier when she took the first flight. It seems that her first test was strongly positive - they jumped on this one right away. They did say that Pham's infection seemed low-grade.

The actual risk is strongly related to the patient's viral count at the time of exposure and symptoms. Her symptoms say low-risk, but I am speculating that the lab results said medium risk.

There's a reason why they are doing this, MorningFog. It's not going to be pure hysteria. They have some sort of methodology behind this. If you have a 2% chance of transmission for each of four people versus a 1% chance of transmission for each of 40 people, you are not better off with the 1%. To resolve the absolute risk, you chase the 1%/40 situation first and harder, because if you don't find any risk at that link in the chain, there either was no transmission or the transmission pops up later somewhere completely unpredictable.