Despite what many news articles may be leading you to believe, the Ebola virus is not the big deal people are making it out to be. Despite the constant bombardment of headlines proclaiming that Ebola will become something akin to the black plague, there almost no chance of this ever happening in the United States.

Ebola is not spread through the air, automatically making it only moderately contagious. You’re more likely to get measles or the flu than Ebola. Ebola is only transferred through contact with bodily fluids of an infected person or animal (for example, through the slaughter of infected livestock). Ebola can also be transported through contact of something an infected person has touched, but the virus dies much quicker in this case.

However, most of the people’s fear comes from the possibly of the virus becoming airborne. But how likely is that? Most scientists have come to an agreement that the possibility of that happening is so unlikely that there is no point thinking about it. As Vincent Racaniello, a virologist at Columbia University stated: “We’ve never seen a human virus change the way it is transmitted.” This is an important statement when you consider that humans have been studying viruses for the past 100 years.

So what does this mean? It means we should stop worrying about the Ebola virus spreading around the US and Europe and start worrying about real possibilities. There is almost no chance that the Ebola virus will spread very far. The only people who are in immediate danger of getting Ebola are people who’ve visited countries where the outbreak is prevalent and the nurses and doctors in charge of patients who have it. The only reason Ebola is spreading so far in Africa is because it is spreading through the water (which is very unlikely to happen in the US due to our superior plumbing and filtration systems).

What should we be doing, then? Instead of investing thousands of dollars on watching the mutations of this virus (which we are doing) we should be working on eradicating it where it is dangerous instead. Instead of focusing on the ”what if”, we need to start working on fixing the “what is.”