Ladies and gentlemen, this is why we’re severely boned if Ebola or some other horrible disease ever gets a real foothold in North America:

NBC medical correspondent Dr. Nancy Snyderman issued a statement tonight apologizing for reported violations of the quarantine she and her NBC News team were placed in after freelancer photographer Ashoka Mukpo, who was working with the NBC team in Liberia, was diagnosed with Ebola.

This wasn’t a lab technician who broke protocol while handling infected blood, nor was it a tired, overworked nurse who somehow got Ebola while treating a single patient.  This was a TV personality, who happens to be an MD, who couldn’t be bothered to take what most of us would consider necessary, maybe onerous, but necessary precautions to make sure that she doesn’t inadvertently spread the disease.  She wasn’t tired or stressed from working day in and day out in an Ebola ward.  She wasn’t short on supplies and personnel.

She wanted soup.

Now, imagine how things will be when there are more patients than doctors and nurses, when basic hygiene items like latex gloves, much less isolation suits, are in short supply.  Think that a necessarily strict and meticulous infectious disease protocol is going to be followed by every medical professional, every time, no matter what?

We have to keep this disease out of the country.  Period. Dot.  We need a quarantine on countries that have had an active outbreak, starting about a month ago.  The chairman of the CDC seems to think that telling people from Western Africa that they just can’t come here is the wrong thing to do, and will help Ebola spread.  His reasoning seems to be that telling people to stay away from our shores if they come from the infected zone will somehow keep those who want to go to help out of the epidemic area, along with the humanitarian aid the region requires.

Here’s my idea:  Any American citizen or permanent resident who wants to return to the United States from Western Africa needs to be put into quarantine for 21 days.  If you’re not showing symptoms after 21 days, you go on about your business and we apologize for the inconvenience.  Anyone who shows symptoms receives immediate treatment, which is better than the usual “I’ll see if it’s better in a couple of days, then I’ll go to the emergency room and expose a couple dozen strangers to the virus.” approach we’ve been trying so far.

If you’re not a citizen or permanent resident and you’ve been in Western Africa in the recent past, sorry, but you’re not coming in.

If we feel the need to pour resources into the countries impacted by the epidemic, so be it.  Any personnel we send over can spend time in quarantine just like everybody else.

But we do everything we can to keep the virus off our shores.

If we don’t do something, and soon, attitudes of “I’m fine, no really” are going to start getting people killed.