An Ebola patient who is in isolation at a Dallas hospital had previous contact with school-age children, Texas Governor Rick Perry said on Wednesday.

Those children are now being monitored at home, Gov. Perry said, and their parents are obviously concerned about the contact.

The news comes as officials confirmed that the patient, seeking treatment at the hospital, told nurses he had traveled to western Africa but was sent home, told he had a low-grade common viral disease.

That information, Dr. Mark Lester, Exec President with Texas Health Resources, was not relayed to everyone who treated him. Asked if it was a misstep, Dr. Lester said no. “I would call that not factoring all the information in among the team that was present so that all the information wasn’t present as they made their clinical decision,” he explained.

“This is all hands on deck,” said Perry of the state’s efforts to contain the virus, which he called a “very serious case.” Texas, the governor said, is one of the best-equipped places in the world to deal with Ebola.

The patient’s condition on Wednesday was upgraded from critical to “serious, but stable,” officials said, adding that they are confident they’ll stop the virus in its tracks.

“This is not west Africa. This is a very sophisticated city, a very sophisticated hospital,” said Dr. David Lakey, head of Texas’s health services. “The dynamics are so significantly different than they are in west Africa that the chances of it being spread are very, very, very small. And again, unless somebody has symptoms its not going to be spread to another individual.”

The virus is not spread through the air, making it far less contagious than the flu and less of a danger to air travelers. Instead, it is spread by contact with bodily fluids.

Here’s how the CDC explains its spread:

Ebola is spread through direct contact (through broken skin or mucous membranes) with blood or body fluids (including but not limited to urine, saliva, feces, vomit, and semen) of a person who is sick with Ebola objects (like needles and syringes) that have been contaminated with the virus infected animals. Ebola is not spread through the air or by water, or in general, food. However, in Africa, Ebola may be spread as a result of handling bushmeat (wild animals hunted for food) and contact with infected bats.

More than 6,500 cases of Ebola have been reported in three western Africa countries — Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone — since the beginning of this year’s outbreak, the WHO said on Tuesday. Over 3,000 people have died.

“Ebola is a scary disease because of the severity of the illness it causes,” CDC chief Dr. Tom Frieden said on Tuesday evening. “We’re stopping it in its tracks in this country.”

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