It was clear from the tone of the coverage of Ebola's arrival in the United States that media gatekeepers expected people to be surprised by a Dallas hospital's decision to turn away U.S. Ebola Patient Zero from the emergency room.

It was, by any standard, a colossal screwup, one that might easily have been avoided. The man was Liberian.

He'd informed ER staff that he'd recently traveled to Liberia, the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. His symptoms — he vomited en route to the hospital — were consistent with Ebola.