My understanding is that Ebola is not very contagious. You need physical contact for the disease to spread. Which is why there was some many victims among nurses and doctors. But also why it is unlikely you will be contaminated if you sit 5 hours in a plane next to someone carrying the disease.

And the interesting thing about Ebola is that while it's not very contagious it is extremely infectious. Which means that you need contact with just a few virus particles to be infected.

It turns out its not actually all that infectious either. It's just very, very hard to sustain not having contact with infectious fluid for very long.

And then it's game over, low survival rate. Which makes it scary but not very dangerous.

I would bet the deadliness of Ebola has been overstated (at least by a little, probably by a lot). Like any infection, many people who get it are probably asymptomatic, and until recently the vast majority of people tested for it were most definitely symptomatic. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/15/ebola-study-fin...

Transmission of Ebola occurs only after patient develops the symptoms of the disease anywhere between 2 days and 3 weeks after infection [1]. By then most patients are not in a condition to be "walking around".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_disease

Ok. I was later thinking that this might be the case. Thank you for finding it.

That's another way of thinking. But a deadly disease is one where death is certain and fatality rate is high. You could say that Ebola had higher chances of spreading, along with being deadly.