A woman suspected of being infected with Ebola is assisted by health workers to an ambulance for treatment in Freetown, Sierra Leone, during a national lockdown. Photo: NY Times
Freetown, Sierra Leone: One of the most stringent anti-Ebola measures is under way as Sierra Leone imposes a three-day national lockdown, ordering people off the streets and into their homes in an effort to stamp out the deadly disease.
Police officers patrolled the streets of the densely populated capital, telling stragglers to go home and stay indoors. Volunteers in bright jerseys prepared to go house-to-house throughout the country to warn people about Ebola’s dangers and to find those who might be infected but were in hiding.
The normally busy streets of Freetown were empty on Friday.
Police guard a roadblock as the government enforces a three-day lockdown on the movement of all people in Sierra Leone. Photo: AP
The country’s president, justifying the extraordinary move in a radio address on Thursday, suggested Sierra Leone was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with the disease.
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“Some of the things we are asking you to do are difficult, but life is better than these difficulties,” President Ernest Bai Koroma said.
More than 200 new cases of Ebola have been reported in Sierra Leone in the past week, reports the World Health Organisation, with transmission described as particularly high in the capital; more than 560 people have died in Sierra Leone, about one-fifth of the total from this outbreak.
The Ebola epidemic sweeping West Africa could infect up to 500,000 people by the end of January, new figures from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention show.
A CDC report was scheduled to be released this week but estimate work was ongoing and case projections could change, said a person familiar with its contents.
The CDC projection assumes no additional aid by governments and relief agencies.
However, the United States last week launched a $US750 million ($840 million) effort to establish treatment facilities with 1700 beds in Liberia, the hardest-hit country.
And the United Nations Security Council voted unanimously on Thursday to create an emergency medical mission to respond to the outbreak, with an advance team in West Africa by the end of the month.
The campaign that began in Sierra Leone on Friday reflects the desperation of West African governments – and, in particular, those of the three hardest-hit countries, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone – as they struggle with an epidemic that the health authorities have warned is showing no signs of slowing down.
No country has attempted anything on the scale of what is being tried in Sierra Leone, where more than 20,000 volunteers enlisted to help identify households where the authorities suspect people infected with the Ebola virus are hiding.
Police moved into Kroo Bay, a densely populated warren of iron-roof shanties where roughly 14,000 people live, yelling at lingering residents to go indoors and warning of imprisonment. People simply stared at the officers and continued lingering.
“The policeman is doing his thing, and I am doing my thing,” said Kerfala Koroma, 22, a building contractor who added that he was waiting for his breakfast. (He is not related to Sierra Leone’s president.) “We can’t even afford something to eat on a normal day. How can we get something now?”
Residents insisted there had been no cases of Ebola in Kroo Bay, although there were loud complaints from some that the bodies of victims had been dumped in a nearby cemetery.
New York Times, Washington Post
