A doctor in New York City who had been working with Doctors Without Borders and recently returned from treating Ebola patients in Guinea tested positive for the Ebola virus Thursday, becoming the city’s first diagnosed case.

The doctor, Craig Spencer, practices at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. According to the hospital, he has not been to work and has not seen any patients since returning from Africa 10 days ago. He was taken to and placed in isolation at Bellevue Hospital, which is one of eight New York hospitals that have been designated and specially staffed and equipped as an Ebola receiving hospital. It has been reported that before he developed symptoms, he had traveled from Manhattan to Brooklyn on the subway on Wednesday night, when he went to a bowling alley and then took a taxi home.

There is no need to panic. We have learned from the cases in Dallas that until a patient is very symptomatic with diarrhea and vomiting they are not highly infective. Ebola is not spread by airborne particles and it is necessary to have contact with infected bodily fluids in order to contract the disease. In Dallas none of the family members or health care workers who encountered the Ebola patient from Africa initially contracted the disease. It was only those health care workers who worked closely with the patient for prolonged periods of time, when he was producing copious amounts of bodily fluids that became infected.

The likelihood of a person in New York City contracting Ebola from casual contact with this patient is slim to none!

Dr. Dan Carlin is founder of WorldClinic, a global concierge telemedicine practice.