Despite the increasingly low chance of someone actually contracting it, everyone seems to be freaking out about Ebola. A student in one of my classes even went as far as to compare Ebola and the plague by saying it will soon spread and wipe out everyone.
The odds of you catching Ebola, however, are extremely low. In fact, it is more probable that you will become drinking buddies with the preacher with the bullhorn on campus than it is for you to catch Ebola.
A graphic on the Washington Post’s website uses 2010 population figures to calculate the odds of you dying from Ebola in the next year:  1 in 309,629,415. Now if you compare that to the odds of you winning the Powerball Jackpot (1 in 175 million), I definitely feel more inclined to spend my money on lottery tickets over medical facemasks and placing myself under quarantine in the safety of my home.
To dig further, Ebola isn’t even in the United States anymore. On Nov. 17, the last patient with Ebola, Dr. Martin Salia, died in an Omaha Nebraska hospital.
If we all put on our thinking caps and looked at Ebola logically, we would all benefit from a significant decrease in the stress levels and overall paranoia of society.  Instead of wasting your time obsessing over the outbreaks of Ebola maybe you should be focusing on issues that are more likely to affect you.
In life there are many more things on which you should focus your concern. If we all lost this herd mentality we have seemed to adopt, maybe we could figure out how to solve daily issues, such as remembering that Chick-Fil-A is closed on Sundays.
Quit feeding into the paranoia of others. Don’t let Ebola keep you from traveling, opening up doors — the physical act of placing your unprotected hand to a germ-infested door knob — and socializing with other people.
Take a risk. Put your travel-size hand sanitizer away, and go out and experience life outside of quarantine. May the odds be ever in your favor.