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Essentially, the virus lives naturally in one or more animal hosts without acting as a pathogen. Fruit bats, other bats, perhaps primates and monkeys, etc., — all suspects. But the virus HAS been found in fruit bats, and reportedly some primates (chimps and Gorillas) can fall ill from Ebola - not the bats.

so ...

If the bat bites you (they are trapped and eaten) ...
If bat (or other carrier) urine/dung is on your hands/food and you ingest it/ wipe your eyes/nose/ mouth ... the virus can get in ‘you.’

Re-use of needles by addicts and healthcare workers is another vector.

Then as you become ill, you have diarrhea, you vomit a bloody vomit, you hemorrhage fluid out your eyes, nose and mouth. It is a gross illness, as any hemorrhagic fever is. Ebola is just one of the worst.

With all that leakage and the contamination that results, Ebola spreads through contact with infected people, clothing, surroundings, etc.

A sick Ebola patient is not mobile. They are bed-ridden at best. I don’t know the time span from exposure/infection to presenting with symptoms, except that the CDC characterizes it as “abruptly.” Yikers; for instance it’s generally about 1-4 days for influenza or SARS, so these ‘flu’ people can be quite mobile as carriers/hosts before presenting with visible symptoms.

MODERN medicine environments can ‘care’ for an Ebola patient with manageable risks.

In the UNLIKELY event the virus broadly entered the US population, it would be a genuine quarantine/ shelter in place/ bug out/ don’t interact for 30 days. The sick die fast. 30 days, presuming 0dummer closed the borders, would be enough to shut down all human-to-human vectors in the US, IMHO.

Ebola is nasty, but is is NOT a 1st world population killer.

H5N1 - the so-called bird flu - were it ever to develop a human to human vector - DOES represent a very real danger to the human population. 50+% deaths, directly and from social/civil disruption are plausible. THAT is a 90 day or more outbreak isolation event. The movie Outbreak gets close, but gets too political, of course. IIRC in that movie it is a porcine virus that kills patient 0, and then spreads via air travel, or maybe that was the World War Z story ... I forget. The models all say the same thing - it’s just a question of speed and lethality.