The Ebola scare was heavily featured on the news talk shows yesterday and led the broadcast newscasts on NBC and ABC last night. (CBS was preempted by football.) The message? We are not having an outbreak here.

CDC Director Thomas Frieden explained on CNN’s State of the Union that Texas patient Thomas Eric Duncan’s contacts were successfully traced:

It’s a hard job. It’s an intense job. It means developing a relationship. We have got about 50 people, including about 10 who definitely had contact, about 40 who might have had contact. And every one of them will be monitored every day to see if they have fever. If they do, they will be promptly isolated.

That’s how you stop it in its tracks. And that’s why we’re confident that we won’t see a large number of cases from this. We are concerned about a couple of family members who had very close contact with him when he was sick. But that’s something that we will just have to check each day for 21 days after the last day of their contact.

Over on Fox News Sunday, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases opined that the CDC was doing everything right on Ebola:

It’s important, because the crux of preventing an outbreak in Dallas or any place else is to do exactly what the CDC and Dallas is doing, monitoring patients on a twice-a-day basis. If they get febrile, then you isolate them and you put them under the protocol of caring for an Ebola patient.

Your question about what the chances are, we don’t know, but I would not be surprised, Chris, if someone who had very close contact with Mr. Duncan actually comes down with Ebola. The encouraging thing about is that person, that small group of risk people are being very closely monitored. And if, in fact, they start to develop symptoms, they’ll be put under the circumstance of not being ability to spread it to other people.

Over the weekend, the host of Ebola scares from D.C., Maryland, New Jersey, Hawaii, Utah, and Toronto were cleared, leaving Duncan as the only known U.S. patient. Calls from medical providers to the CDC over Ebola concerns have jumped to 800 per day, from 50 before Duncan’s case went public, indicating that the medical community is determined not to mess up like the Dallas hospital did with Duncan.

Howard Kurtz thinks that the media is overhyping the Ebola story, and I think he’s right. At the moment the U.S. has only one case, which is being managed. But fear of the disease, which kills horrifically, is giving the networks and newspapers high viewership and readership, which only encourages more breathless reporting over every new patient who comes down with a fever after a trip to Africa. The viral panic is also leading to many calls to institute a travel ban, including from politicians, despite health experts’ explanation that a ban would make combating the disease more difficult.