>The early symptoms of Ebola are familiar enough: fever, severe headache, musculoskeletal aches and pains, shivering chills, weakness. He *might* have had weakness when he rode the train but fever didn't begin until the following day.

And someone can mistake those as early flu symptoms. Surely you realize that any intelligent person can list a dozen alternate reasons that someone (even a physician) might mistake for something else. And surely you realize that 10 different people might feel the weight of symptoms differently.

I reiterate my point - you can't put imprecision on one side of the equation and precision on the other side.

Different angle: a wild animal (one capable of having rabies) bites you, and then runs away. You have no chance to catch it. Gonna wait if/until you feel symptomatic (and trust the precision of when you first feel symptomatic) to go get some rabies shots, or will you immediately drive to the first emergency room and beg for rabies shots? Not the same circumstances but hopefully you see what I'm getting at.