No it's not a big deal. Ebola is deadly if you catch it but it is not very contagious at all. You need to be in contact with someone's fluids basically. It can't go very far.
This isn't straight Ebolavirus (Zaire), but this thing [1]. We don't have enough data yet to confirm it spreads like Ebola among humans.
I'm OK with some caution.
Haven’t we been burnt by being not cautious enough when COVID hit? Initially most scientists said “we don’t know if it’s airborne” or they said “there are no signs that it’s airborne” and the media turned it into “nothing flying fear” - and a few weeks later it was suddenly airborne.
“We don’t know” is a normal state in science and policies and personal behavior can take unknowns into consideration.
Instead a great deal of modern infrastructure like subway systems makes things more difficult not less.
infrastructure density matters, but it doesn’t affect both the same way.
Ebola like many viruses can be contagious without direct touching.
It’s not well adapted to airborne transmission, but it’s very good at causing people to spread bodily fluids all over the place. So a very sick individual passing through a subway seeking medical treatment could infect a large number of people.
> reproduced and mutated as rapidly as viruses
HIV spreads in similar ways afaik (some fluids, I don't know the details of Ebola but it's not respiratory), yet that hasn't gone airborne in decades. I'm well aware that pigs don't get a million offspring each, but it doesn't seem like a common event for viruses to completely change their mechanism overnight either. Hence the quadrillion odds I mentioned, I was indeed referencing that they mutate so much, and yet...
Yes. A single gene change allows for airborne Ebola transmission. This gene change has occurred in the Reston strain, which luckily does not cause symptoms in humans.