Even as U.S. health authorities continue to tell Americans not to worry about the Ebola virus, their assurances are being undercut by the increasingly obvious deficiencies in domestic planning. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has repeatedly been forced to back away from his calming assertions that U.S. hospitals were ready for the disease and that the nation’s quarantines were more effective than those in Africa and would keep any infected people at home.

Frieden has now had to acknowledge that protocol breaches probably led to two Dallas hospital nurses becoming infected with Ebola. And a national nurses union is contending that from the start, the hospital personnel who cared for Liberian traveler Thomas Eric Duncan were outfitted with inadequate protective gear and told to patch up any gaps with tape.

What’s more, the nation’s voluntary quarantines have proved ineffective; Duncan’s family ventured out into the community despite being warned not to. Now they are required to stay at home and are being supervised to make sure they do so. And members of an NBC News reporting crew that had returned to the United States from West Africa agreed to a voluntary quarantine after a cameraman tested positive for Ebola, and then violated it. Only later was their quarantine made mandatory.

On Wednesday, Frieden acknowledged that the second Dallas nurse to test positive for Ebola should not have been traveling on a commercial plane, which she did with a low-grade fever even though she and others knew she had been in close contact with the virus. Now the CDC is trying to contact the other passengers, though the risk of spread is considered very remote.

And in another worrisome development, some Ebola experts are questioning the common assumption that screening for fever is a surefire way to detect Ebola. In the current West Africa outbreak, about 13 percent of people with the disease never developed a fever.

The United States does not remotely have an Ebola crisis, but it is beginning to have a crisis of confidence in the Obama administration’s handling of the matter.

President Obama made the right move when he offered $1 billion worth of aid to West Africa. Substantial aid is not only a necessary humanitarian response, but the smartest way to prevent a global health problem.

Now the administration also must toughen up its response at home. That means required training for hospital staffs in recognizing and reacting to the disease, rules that ensure infected patients will be treated only in facilities equipped to handle the complicated protocols and mandatory quarantines of exposed people.

— Los Angeles Times