An ambulance carrying Amber Joy Vinson, the second health-care worker to be diagnosed with Ebola in Texas, arrives at Emory University Hospital on October 15th. Photograph by David Tulis/AP

The headlines on the front pages of the New York tabloids aren’t the most scientific gauge of popular opinion. On slow news days, desperate editors are often obliged to try and make something out of nothing. (I know: twenty years ago, I did a stint as an editor at the New York Post.) But when both the Post and the Daily News go big on the same story, you can usually be assured that they are onto something of public concern.

Here are the front pages from Thursday’s editions: the Post’s headline was “AIR EBOLA: Frantic hunt for 132 passengers,” accompanied by pictures of a Frontier jet and Amber Joy Vinson, the unfortunate Dallas nurse who, on Monday, flew Frontier from Cleveland to Dallas despite having a low fever that turned out to be a symptom of the virus; the Daily News had “FOR GOD’S SAKE, GET A GRIP.” Next to the headline was a picture of President Obama.

About a week ago, I warned that the politics of Ebola could turn into a nightmare. With Vinson and another nurse who treated Thomas Eric Duncan, who died of Ebola, having tested positive for the virus, we aren’t quite there yet, but we aren’t far off, either.

Maybe you are willing to write off the New York tabloids as yellow-journalist scaremongers out to take down the President, but what about The Hill, the nonpartisan online newspaper that covers Washington politics? In a post on Thursday, one of its White House correspondents, Justin Sink, wrote, “The Ebola crisis in the United States has become an anchor threatening to sink the Obama presidency.”

What about the Washington Post? At the top of its Web site on Thursday, there were two Ebola stories. The first one conveyed the news, also reported by other outlets, that Vinson, on developing a fever of 99.5 degrees over the weekend, had called the Centers for Disease Control and had been permitted to fly back to Dallas on a commercial flight. The other story, which was slugged “Ebola fuels epidemic of fear in U.S.,” said that stores in Dallas are running out of hand sanitizer, and that schoolchildren in northern Virginia are scared—and so are many adults. According to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll, which was carried out before the latest developments, two-thirds of Americans are worried about a widespread Ebola epidemic, and more than four in ten are worried that they or a close family member will catch the virus.

From a scientific point of view, that’s pretty nuts. In a country with a population of more than three hundred million, just two people who haven’t travelled to West Africa have contracted Ebola, and they both treated Duncan when he was dying in an isolation ward. It is well established that most victims of the disease only become contagious when they develop noticeable symptoms, such as vomiting and diarrhea. So far as we know, the people who were with Duncan in a Dallas apartment after he arrived from Liberia and started to get sick appear to be fine. When President Obama said on Wednesday, “It is not like the flu. It is not airborne.… The likelihood of widespread Ebola outbreaks in this country are very, very low,” he was only restating what virtually every health expert has been saying for months.

At this stage, though, such reassurances are wearing a bit thin. To many ordinary Americans, two Dallas nurses going down with Ebola is a serious outbreak of the disease, and they fear that it won’t remain confined to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital. Even granted that the current dangers of Ebola have been greatly overblown, this isn’t a wholly irrational posture. After all, in the early stages of any outbreak of an infectious disease, the chances of getting sick are vanishingly small.

It’s all very well for the Centers for Disease Control to call for calm. But with the news that Vinson contacted the C.D.C. before setting out for Dallas, public confidence in the agency and its leader, Tom Frieden, has taken another hit. (My colleague Amy Davidson has an excellent post on the questions raised by the Vinson story.) On Thursday, Frieden went to Capitol Hill, where he said that he was “open to ideas” about keeping Americans safe, but didn’t unveil any new ones of his own. “We should not panic,” Frieden said. “We know how to stop Ebola outbreaks. The best way to stop Ebola is to fight it in Africa.”

At least one member of Congress, the Dallas Republican Pete Sessions, has already called on Frieden to resign. Ultimately, however, the C.D.C. director is just a federal bureaucrat. Political responsibility for the handling of the situation rests with President Obama, who acknowledged as much on Wednesday by cancelling a campaign trip, huddling with members of his cabinet, and emerging to call for the establishment of federal SWAT teams that would descend upon any hospital where an Ebola case is confirmed. “We’re going to make sure something like this is not repeated,” Obama said. “Monitoring, supervising, and overseeing in a much more aggressive way than in Dallas initially.”

It was a headline-grabbing move; what it amounts to remains to be seen. The President’s problem is that he appears to be reacting to events rather than dictating them. Initially, his Administration resisted calls to screen visitors from West Africa; the day Duncan died, it announced a system of screening. Until yesterday, the White House insisted that the C.D.C. had established proper protocols and systems for hospitals dealing with Ebola victims. Now it is beefing up federal oversight and promising to fly in SWAT teams.

Will that be enough? In terms of fighting the disease and protecting health workers, we can only hope so. For political reasons, however, Obama will almost certainly have to do more—a point conceded by one of his former spokesmen, Jay Carney, who on Thursday advised the White House to reconsider its opposition to banning flights from West Africa. “I think substantive actions need to be taken, and they may involve flight restrictions, they may involve moving all patients to specific hospitals in the country that can handle Ebola,” Carney told CNN. “I’m not an expert, but I think that would demonstrate a level of seriousness in response to this that is merited at this point.”

With the midterms less than twenty days away, the timing could hardly be worse for the Democrats. At Daily Kos on Wednesday, there was a post headlined “Is Ebola Obama’s Katrina?” The poster wrote, “Fox ‘News’ hopes so, believes so. el Rushbo, Vanity, Mike Savage and the rest of the RW Noise Machine all pumping it. And, Americans eating it up. Not just wingnuts and Birchers. The mainstream American buying this hook, line and sinker. Politics all about perception, Ebola appears to be Obama’s Katrina moment. And, as this election is all about Obama, it appears the RW is right. This looks to be a 2010 wave. Tsunami, even. Talk me down.”

O.K., I will. Comparisons with Katrina are so clearly politically motivated that they may backfire. It’s not that bad—not yet, anyway. As I pointed out on Wednesday in a lengthy campaign update, the outcome of the midterm elections is far from determined. Given President Obama’s dismal approval ratings in many of the closely contested states, the Democrats are making a commendable fight of it. But one thing can’t be denied: they could have done without this.