A resident of a mid-size Midwestern college town took to social media this week to make a case against increased housing density that, we must admit, we did not see coming.

The argument: building more apartments and multi-family housing would make the city vulnerable to the rapid spread of contagious diseases. The evidence presented: a highlighted textbook passage about Ebola transmission in the capitals of Congo and Uganda.

The post read, in part: “Some people in the city government desire density. But density enables rapid transmission of contagious disease.”

Attached was a screenshot of a passage explaining that Ebola spreads more rapidly in dense urban settings, with key phrases highlighted in yellow for emphasis.

The post received 9 reactions and 81 comments.

To be clear about a few things.

The city in question has a population of approximately 125,000 people. It is located in the upper Midwest of the United States, roughly 7,000 miles from the nearest documented Ebola outbreak. It has recorded zero cases of Ebola in its history. The proposed housing development that prompted this post was, by all accounts, a fairly standard multifamily building.

The passage the resident highlighted was describing conditions in cities where overcrowded informal housing, limited sanitation infrastructure, and inadequate healthcare access create genuine public health emergencies. It was not describing a university town with a Trader Joe’s and a well-funded public health department.

As one commenter pointed out, there is a meaningful distinction between density and overcrowding — a distinction the UN-Habitat World Cities Report has specifically addressed. Dense cities with proper infrastructure (think: Tokyo, Amsterdam, much of Manhattan) do not, in fact, experience higher rates of infectious disease than sprawling ones. Overcrowded housing with poor sanitation does. These are different things.

But that nuance was, apparently, not the point. The point was that apartments are bad, and sometimes you need to cite an Ebola textbook to make that case.

We salute the effort.