Not the kind of distinction the U.S. craves: America now is the country with the greatest number of Ebola cases outside West Africa. With the infection reported Thursday night of a New York doctor recently returned from treating patients in Guinea, the number is four, including the late Liberian Thomas Duncan and two nurses in Dallas.

If Washington’s reason for resisting a travel ban from the hotzone countries is fear of being accused of racial profiling, politicians will be relieved by the rainbow coalition of the afflicted in the U.S.—two black, one Asian, one white.

A travel ban might not solve much but seems increasingly sensible given that a person can be infected for 10 or 20 days and not know it—and neither would airport screeners be able to detect it. Dr. Craig Spencer, the New York victim and an expert on Ebola, apparently not even suspecting that he might have been exposed, traveled on the subway and went bowling the night before developing symptoms. And yet who in New York is surprised a victim turned up in their city? Which New Yorker hasn’t already figured, if there’s one in Dallas, there’s got to be at least three here?

People are irrational in their assessment of risks, blah, blah. Yes, we can find here and there examples of Americans overreacting to Ebola. But more in evidence has been media’s own anti-hysteria hysteria. This week a Bloomberg Radio host rudely and repeatedly (and uncharacteristically) hushed a Wall Street analyst for suggesting we still have things to learn about how the virus is transmitted. Guess what? This is true. What’s more the virus is subject to forces of natural selection, so even our broadly reliable generalizations about transmissibility are hardly written in stone.

The media, as if citing an iron law, keep telling us that (to use the New York Times formulation) “people infected with Ebola cannot spread the disease until they begin to display symptoms, and it cannot be spread through the air.”