THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

To judge by the reactions in Texas and Ohio, there are a lot of public officials in need of clean underwear.

Officials at school districts in Texas and Ohio shut schools on Thursday after they learned that two students traveled on the Cleveland-to-Dallas flight with Amber Joy Vinson, a nurse infected with Ebola, and that an employee may have later flown on the same plane.

The superintendent of the Belton Independent School District, south of Waco, said that a student at Sparta Elementary School and a student at North Belton Middle School were on Frontier Airlines Flight 1143 on Monday.

The superintendent, Susan Kincannon, said in a statement that officials had decided to shut the two schools plus a third, the Belton Early Childhood School, so they could thoroughly clean and disinfect the schools and the buses that served them this week.

The two students were on the flight on Monday and then attended classes on Tuesday and Wednesday, the statement said. Though state and local health officials had cleared the children to return to school, their parents decided to keep them home for 21 days, the maximum incubation period of the virus...

In Solon, a Cleveland suburb of about 23,000, two schools were closed on Thursday because a district employee returned to Ohio “on a different flight, but perhaps the same aircraft, as the Texas nurse with Ebola,” the district said in an email to parents.

And officials of two major health systems in Cleveland — the Cleveland Clinic and MetroHealth — said that a group of nurses had been placed on leave because they were aboard Ms. Vinson’s first flight, from Dallas to Ohio, on Friday.
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“The decision to put those nurses on paid leave really has to do with decreasing anxiety,” Dr. Jennifer Hanrahan, the chairwoman of MetroHealth’s infectious disease control committee, said at a news conference. “It’s not because of any perceived risk to them or to anyone.”

Good God! How many people on that flight were 'swapping spit' with Amber Vinson? And will those two kids re-adapt to school after 21 days of playing video games with no Mall breaks in between? Will we ever survive?