Liz Szabo

USA TODAY

Infectious disease experts say school officials in Ohio and Texas overreacted when they canceled classes Thursday in fear of Ebola.

Several schools in both states shut their doors over concerns that some staff members and students might have come in contact with a person infected with the virus.

An e-mail sent to parents in the Solon City School District in Northeast Ohio said they closed Solon Middle and Parkside Elementary schools Thursday after they learned that a middle school staff member may have traveled aboard the same airplane, though not on the same flight, as Dallas nurse Amber Joy Vinson.

Vinson, 29, was one of two nurses who contracted Ebola after caring for Thomas Eric Duncan, who died from Ebola on Oct. 8 while visiting Dallas from Liberia. Vinson had flown to the Cleveland area to plan her wedding.

"She was not at football games. She was not at restaurants. She was not at pizza parlors," Gene Nixon, Summit County health commissioner, said at a press conference. "She was very conscious of what she went through in Dallas."

But she did go to one store, where health officials tracked down five contacts that now are under voluntary quarantine and daily monitoring for 21 days, Nixon said. His office is continuing interviews with family members to determine whether they can remember any other place Vinson might have visited.

Seven people in the Cleveland area are being quarantined voluntarily. Vinson's mother, who traveled to Dallas and has no symptoms, also is under quarantine.

In the Solon schools e-mail, officials say they learned about their teacher's travel late Wednesday.

The closing of both schools is a precaution to allow the buildings to be disinfected, they said.

"She was a very responsible person," Dr. Marguerite Erme, medical director of Summit County Public Health, said of Vinson. "She did not take undue risks. She seems to have limited her activity here."

Vinson arrived in the Cleveland area on Friday and left Monday on a return flight to Dallas. Before the boarded the return flight, she reported to the CDC that she had a temperature of 99.5 degrees but no other symptoms.

To call Vinson's 99.5-degree temperature a fever is a mischaracterization, Erme said. The average normal body temperature is 98.6, but that can vary by the time of day or activity level.

That temperature is so low, in fact, that even an airport screening program — such as those in West Africa, where fliers' temperatures are taken before they're allowed to board planes — wouldn't have flagged her as a suspicious case, said infectious disease expert Robert Murphy, director of the Center for Global Health at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

The schools have overreacted, Murphy said. Ebola does not spread through the air like measles or the flu.

Ebola spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids, such as blood or saliva. Someone sitting near Vinson on a plane would not be at significant risk of infection, said Paul Offit, director of infectious diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

"Those who shared a plane with someone who was infected weren't at risk, assuming they didn't kiss her on the lips before getting off the plane," Offit said.

Many people are confused about how Ebola spreads and when it's most contagious, Murphy said. When people are first infected, the amount of virus in their blood isn't even detectable. People aren't contagious until they begin showing symptoms, such as a fever. Even then, they are only mildly contagious.

Murphy noted that none of the 48 people with whom patient Thomas Eric Duncan had contact before his diagnosis have become ill, even though it has been nearly three weeks and those people have passed through the highest-risk time of their 21-day observation period.

Even Duncan's fiancee and family, who shared a small apartment, haven't become sick.

Ebola becomes much more contagious as people develop advanced illness, when the virus begins multiplying wildly and a patient begins to bleed heavily. That's why nurses and others who work in intensive-care units attending to people with advanced Ebola are at such high risk.

"Schools should not be closed for something like this," Murphy said. "It sets a very bad precedent."

Closing schools could scare some parents into believing that the threat of Ebola is far greater than it is, he said.There will probably be many more Ebola scares throughout the country, he said, and schools can't shut down for all of them.

Schools don't close when a student has measles even though that disease is far more contagious, Murphy said.

"This reminds me of the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when people were afraid to buy a piece of fruit in the supermarket because they didn't know who had recently touched it," Offit said.

In other school districts:

In Belton in Central Texas, three schools were closed Thursday over health concerns surrounding two students who traveled on the Monday flight with Vinson.Schools Superintendent Susan Kincannon of the Belton Independent School District said in a written statement sent to parents Wednesday that the district did not know if health risks to passengers aboard the Frontier Airlines flight included the students.The two students will stay home for 21 days, the outer limits of the incubation period for the disease, and their health will be monitored daily.

In Fort Worth, Eagle Mountain-Saginaw Independent schools School District said late Wednesday that a family member of a Lake Pointe Elementary School student also was aboard the same flight as Vinson and that the family would be quarantined for 21 days.

In Shaker Heights, Ohio, officials at Hathaway Brown School informed parents that a student whose houseguest was on the same Oct. 10 Dallas-to-Cleveland flight with Vinson was being kept home from school as a precaution. The student did not have contact with Vinson, said Kathleen Osborne, a school spokeswoman.

In Cleveland, John F. Kennedy High School was thoroughly cleaned and a teacher of freshmen was ordered to stay at home after officials learned that the teacher may have come in contact with a person infected with Ebola. It was not clear whether the person was Vinson, according to a Cleveland Metropolitan School District press release.

Parents were notified about the precautions and the school was cleaned with a bleach-based cleaning solution based on CDC guidelines.

A district statement said no students or staff were at risk, but the precautions were taken to quell concerns "given the nation's heightened anxiety about the Ebola virus."

Contributing: WKYC-TV, Cleveland; KHOU-TV, Houston; and KCEN-TV, Waco-Temple-College Station, Texas