Seven-year-old Ikeoluwa Opayemi went back to school in Milford on Halloween after being quarantined because of Ebola fears. She is the youngest person to have been quarantined in the United States and the only person who hadn't been in any of the three countries where the Ebola epidemic is raging.

Her return to the Meadowside Elementary School came just a single school day before she was to end 21 days of confinement at home because of what the town's health director admitted was fear bordering on panic, rather than for any rational health reason. By letting her return to school a day before the ban was to be lifted, the town also avoided a lawsuit filed on her behalf by her father.

Elizabeth Feser, the superintendent of schools, announced the child could return to school early because her doctor had declared she is perfectly healthy, the same diagnosis he made upon her return from Africa.

Stephen Opayemi had taken his daughter to Nigeria, where she was a flower girl at a family wedding. Nigeria, like the Ebola stricken nations of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, is in West Africa but the similarity ends there.

Nigeria is Ebola free according to the World Health Organization. It is hundreds of miles from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, where 4,910 have died from Ebola as of Nov. 1, according to a survey by the British Broadcasting Corp. Eight have died in Nigeria and there has been one death in the United States.

The trouble, it appears, is in the guidelines.

A guideline is little more than a suggestion - a plan to guide the recipient in setting a standard. When it became evident that the Ebola outbreak could lead to the spread of the disease to the United States, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidelines that called for anyone exposed to the bodily fluids of an Ebola patient and is symptomatic to be isolated immediately in a health care facility. This is because, unlike most contagious diseases, Ebola can only be transmitted through exposure to body fluids and not by other means like coughing and sneezing.

Those who have had high-risk exposure to Ebola patients, including medical personnel, but are otherwise symptom free, should undergo active monitoring, according to the CDC guidelines, and are allowed to take part in what it calls "non-congregate public activities." This means those being monitored can go to public places where they are able to keep their distance, three feet or more, from others.

These guidelines have been interpreted in various ways by the states, depending on their locations, the overseas flights to their airports and, according to some reports, election year politics. New York, New Jersey and Illinois, with airports frequented by overseas flights and governors either running for re-election or possibly for president in 2016, adopted the strictest rules and then walked some of them back after considerable criticism, especially when they adopted mandatory quarantines of medical workers returning from the three nations with Ebola epidemics.

Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy took a middle course between the neighboring states and the CDC, affirming a case-by-case approach to quarantines. As a result, nine people have been confined to their homes, with one order later rescinded, according to The New York Times.

In Connecticut, the state Department of Education issued its own letter of guidance to school districts, advising them to contact their local health departments and the state Public Health Department if a student or staff member has returned from one of the three West African nations.

This was a guideline without guidance. It has resulted in some school systems automatically barring all travelers to Liberia, Sierra Leone or Guinea from school for 21 days, whether they had been exposed to Ebola or not, while others have made individual decisions. Even though none of these guidelines, rules or mandates applied to her, the flower girl from Milford was barred from her school for nearly three weeks just because she attended a wedding in Africa.

There is, of course, no quarrel about the need to be vigilant about preventing the spread of this terrible disease, but there is also a need for leadership that goes beyond issuing guidelines and that needs to start at the top, which is the Centers for Disease Control and ultimately, the president.