This is from the CDC
I have a question. Banning flights from affected countries is not a good idea we are told. Rather, monitoring individuals coming here from West Africa will do the job.
What if a person arrives in the U.S three days after being infected? No symptoms, but eighteen days more where symptoms could appear. How are we being protected?😰
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 
Assuming everything above is correct, we are protected because it takes “direct contact with an individual experiencing symptoms or who has died of the disease” to be infected. What this really means is that their blood or other bodily fluids need to get onto you, it does not mean sitting next to them on an airplane or being in the same room with them unless they are in the process of vomiting, diarrhea or bleeding and they do it on you or you are cleaning it up or you somehow otherwise come into contact with it, or you have sex with them which seems really unlikely when they’re actively symptomatic.
West African health care and American health care are worlds apart. Here the ones at risk for contracting Ebola are the health care workers providing direct patient care to those with the illness, particularly as the illness advances to later stages. There have been two US cases of transmission, both to nurses caring for an Ebola patient. Of the Ebola patients who have been transported to the US there have been a total of zero transmissions among the people involved in bringing them here and hospital workers who are not providing direct patient care.
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I think you miss the point here. Regardless of how the disease is passed along, if you let in people who you don’t know are already infected (because they are still in the 21 day period), you lose control of them and they then can pass along the disease.
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I fully understand your point, you are perhaps missing my point that in the US society and healthcare system they will not pass it on in the way that it is spreading in West Africa. Isolated clusters of cases are of course horrible but are not an epidemic. If the CDC does have this wrong (which I very much doubt) and cases of Ebola start showing up that are not heath care workers involved in direct patient care or perhaps close family members of someone who for some strange reason tried to hide from the healthcare system I’ll then be very worried and will eat my words. If as I believe this turns out to be a non-event limited to a very unfortunate but small number of infections I hope you’ll be willing to do the same.
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