In short, no. Ebola does not do well in water.
As for some of the questions from earlier, I did get some of them answered. These are not in any particular order.
The quarantine enforcement is handled on the county or state level, so the local police should be the ones that food drop-offs should be coordinated with. Emergency preparedness supplies are things that households with the motivation and means should have in case of natural disasters. I've made having these supplies a priority for my household since my son was born.
No one else from the plane was quarantined because they had very very little risk. I spoke with a silver-haired Frenchman who has worked with Ebola for longer than I and many posters have been alive, and in his nearly 40 years of experience, people tend to become infectious 2-3 days after they have a fever. Ebola can be detected in their blood, but transmission, for all intents and purposes, does not become a feasible reality until after the person starts vomiting or having diarrhea. This also means that those travelling that use cold water or fever reducing drugs like ibuprofen prior to boarding planes will likely not infect anyone on the flight, although that still leaves us with managing them once they arrive. This also explains why the Dallas school was not shut down. Parents did not and need to pull their kids out. Also, international agencies have not called for the lockdown on travel yet because there are slews of aid workers coming in and out of the country, and draconian travel restrictions would prompt additional attempts at escape and evasion.
Stericycle, a waste disposal company that manages 60% of all US hospitals' medical waste, has as of today finalized an agreement with the Department of Transportation. They can come to private dwellings to dispose of contaminated materials (such as sheets in the Dallas example). Out of the 100 contacts that were investigated, 15 were deemed to be at great enough risk to be isolated and tested.
Healthcare workers that have worked in Ebola treatmednt centers in the three most affected west African countries frequently did not have adequate PPE for their conditions. For example, nurses were being issued 4 pairs of gloves per week. Think long and hard on that one. When interviewed about how he may have gotten ebola, Dr. Kent Brantly reflected that even though he had sufficient PPE, he most likely got exposed in the non-isolation part of the facility. These locations have overwhelmed triage areas that mixed ebola suspected and non-suspected patients.
As for why things seem so disorganized in our own domestic response: It is not necessary yet! All of the coordinated response seen in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia has been the result of international intervention because these resource poor countries have been devastated by the outbreak. They were in bad shape already, and in the aftermath of this, there may not even be a functioning state left. Their governments' ability to intervene does not even exist at this point, their society has collapsed.
Phewc, that was a lot of typing.
That's all I have for now.
