The experts had warned that fighting Ebola is hard, and Wednesdays drumbeat of bad news proved them correct. The day began with a bulletin about another health-care worker stricken with the deadly disease, and the news got worse with the revelation that she had flown with a slightly elevated temperature from Cleveland to Dallas on a crowded airliner barely 24 hours before her diagnosis.

Before she boarded that flight, the woman, identified by Ohio officials as Amber Joy Vinson, 29, informed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that she was running a temperature of 99.5 degrees, a federal official told The Washington Post.

That was below the 100.4-degree threshold in CDC guidelines for screening travelers who have been in Ebola-affected countries, and which triggers a secondary screening. The CDC did not prohibit Vinson from traveling on the plane back to Dallas, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the issue.

But on Wednesday, CDC Director Thomas Frieden said that Vinson should not have been flying anywhere given her possible exposure to Ebola at her workplace, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, which has been the epicenter of the crisis in the United States.

Vinson did not yet have the classic symptoms of a full-blown Ebola infection, such as vomiting and diarrhea, and so epidemiologists doubt that she spread the virus during the journey. Ebola is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids, which carry a higher viral load as the disease progresses.

A Frontier Airlines plane is reportedly being disinfected in Cleveland after a second nurse to become infected with Ebola flew on the plane from Cleveland to Dallas on Monday. (Reuters)

But Frontier Airlines and the CDC scrambled to contact the 132 passengers aboard Flight 1143, and the people on that flight joined a growing pool of people in the United States who may have been exposed to the virus in recent weeks.

As Wednesday ended, Americans had to be wondering when the U.S. outbreak will be contained, and whether public officials measured language and repeated reassurances are a gloss on a desperate and sometimes improvisational battle against a disease that in West Africa has killed more than 4,000 people.

The Vinson case highlighted how easily someone who is unknowingly infected can travel a great distance and potentially expose hundreds of new people. Scores of hospital staffers were involved in the treatment of the index patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who died of Ebola at the hospital Oct.8.

It is now clear that Presbyterian Hospital experienced a catastrophic failure of infection control when it treated Duncan. He fell ill four days after arriving in Dallas by plane from Liberia, a trip that included connecting flights in Brussels and at Washington Dulles International Airport. When Duncan first went to the hospital, he was sent home despite a high fever and his stated travel history, a misstep that the hospital still has not fully explained. Two days later, on Sept.28, he returned, with his family fearing that he had Ebola.

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Health-care worker with Ebola was allowed to fly despite reporting slight fever