Thomas Eric Duncan left Monrovia, Liberia, on Sept. 19, for Dallas. Eleven days later, doctors diagnosed Duncan with Ebola.

Eight days after that, he was dead.

Duncan’s case is just one of two Ebola-related fatalities in the United States, and since Duncan traveled to Dallas, more Americans -- at least nine, and likely many more -- have died from the flu.

Yet fear of the disease stretched to every corner of America this fall, stoked by exaggerated claims from politicians and pundits. They said Ebola was easy to catch, that illegal immigrants may be carrying the virus across the southern border, that it was all part of a government or corporate conspiracy.

The claims -- all wrong -- distorted the debate about a serious public health issue. Together, they earn our Lie of the Year for 2014.

PolitiFact editors choose the Lie of the Year, in part, based on how broadly a myth or falsehood infiltrates conventional thinking. In 2013, it was the promise made by President Barack Obama and other Democrats that "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it." While no singular line about Ebola matched last year’s empty rhetoric about health care, the statements together produced a dangerous and incorrect narrative.

PolitiFact and PunditFact rated 16 separate claims about Ebola as Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire on our Truth-O-Meter in 2014. Ten of those claims came in October, as Duncan’s case came to the fore and as voters went to the polls to select a new Congress.

Fox News analyst George Will claimed Ebola could be spread into the general population through a sneeze or a cough, saying the conventional wisdom that Ebola spreads only through direct contact with bodily fluids was wrong.

"The problem is the original assumption, said with great certitude if not certainty, was that you need to have direct contact, meaning with bodily fluids from someone, because it’s not airborne," Will said. "There are doctors who are saying that in a sneeze or some cough, some of the airborne particles can be infectious." False .

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., described Ebola as "incredibly contagious," "very transmissible" and "easy to catch." Mostly False .

Internet conspirators claimed President Obama intended to detain people who had signs of illness. Pants on Fire . Bloggers also said the outbreak was started in a bioweapons lab funded by George Soros and Bill Gates. Pants on Fire .

A Georgia congressman claimed there were reports of people carrying diseases including Ebola across the southern border. Pants on Fire . Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said Americans were told the country would be Ebola-free. False .

When combined, the claims edged the nation toward panic. Governors fought Washington over the federal response. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stumbled to explain details about transmission of the virus and its own prevention measures. American universities turned away people from Africa, whether they were near the outbreak or not .

"Americans spent March through July thinking that the outbreak was no threat at all, then from August to October, it was the apocalypse," said Stephen Gire, a researcher who has been to West Africa and is studying the Ebola genome at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. "And now in December, a year after the first case of Ebola infected a young Guinean, Americans are complaining that it was all ‘overhyped.’

"During this whole year, people in West Africa have been dying of Ebola at an increasing rate. We as Americans are so far removed from the reality of what is really going on."

From Liberia to Dallas, the facts

Duncan died at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital on Oct. 8, but that single event was months in the making.

Health workers identified Ebola in March in the West African country of Guinea and later in Sierra Leone and Liberia. The virus didn’t garner much attention from the United States at first. But by June, the international medical group Doctors Without Borders warned that efforts to contain the disease were failing.

A month later, two U.S. health care workers in Liberia became ill.

Their homecomings played out in front of a national television audience. News helicopters followed Dr. Kent Brantly’s ambulance on a half-hour ride through Atlanta, and watched as Brantly emerged in a protective suit, leaning on the arm of another health care worker.

Brantly’s arrival, followed days later by Nancy Writebol, set off a frenzy of commentary, reaction, and eventually, misinformation. Websites like Infowars.com made an erroneous connection between their arrival and an executive order that the website claimed "mandates the apprehension and detention of Americans who merely show signs of 'respiratory illness.' " ( Pants on Fire .)

Personalities such as Donald Trump called for stopping all flights from countries where Ebola cases had been found. Governors in New York and New Jersey moved to strictly quarantine health care workers even if they showed no symptoms, procedures that were later relaxed.