After Sunday’s false Ebola alarm that disrupted life and traffic in Jackson Health System's Miami neighborhood, hospital officials used Monday for an Ebola-related media event that was oddly reassuring.

In a tiny examination room at the hospital’s Ryder Trauma Center, two doctors demonstrated the protective clothing that medical personnel would wear if a patient who really had Ebola were to show up. They included a water-proof gown, goggles, face masks, head coverings and booties – all designed to keep the deadly droplets of infected body fluids from inflicting a statistically-probable lethal illness on a doctor or a nurse.

“The equipment that we are showing you is even more than the [U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] minimum requirement,” said Dr. Abdul Memon, medical director for Jackson’s emergency operations.

Rick Stone

Doctors confirmed the protective clothing on display included no Ebola specialty items, just routine equipment in daily use at the hospital. It was remarkable only that so much of it was required at one time. But even so, Memon said, the full kit met requirements of only the third most stringent protective protocol of the four on the CDC scale.

Ebola doesn’t rate the full treatment because it can’t infect through the air. It requires contact with body fluids from a patient who is already showing symptoms.

And that was the reassurance. Ebola may be a deadly virus with a fearsome fatality rate, but it’s not the smartest virus in the virus book. It can be thwarted with regular hospital equipment and infection methods that the common cold has thoroughly mastered are beyond its abilities.

“Ebola is not as easy to transmit as a bad flu,” Memon said.

Not that guards are being let down. The deaths continue in West Africa. Transportation officials remain on high alert for travelers from the hardest-hit countries of West Africa.

And just as Monday’s photo op was beginning, there was news that a nurse’s assistant in Spain had just become the first person to contract Ebola outside of Africa – and in a modern western hospital setting.

Despite the apparent ineptitude of the virus itself, experts are concluding that it got a strong foothold in Africa because the response to contain it was slow and even less competent than Ebola itself.