Ebola: An Eyewitness Account from Sierra Leone

Kerry Town, the site of a treatment center run by Save the Children, is in a part of Sierra Leone where the number of new Ebola cases is still rising.

DECEMBER 2, 2014: THE TREATMENT GAP

But it’s impossible to avoid the fact of the outbreak for long. Every few miles police or soldiers stop traffic at checkpoints and take each traveller’s temperature. People file out of minibuses, line up for officials wielding thermometers, and reboard their vehicles on the other side of the cordon. Posters describing the signs and symptoms of Ebola are pasted up on buildings and houses; schools are empty, their gates closed and classes cancelled.

Ebola survivor Abie Kanu prepares to leave a treatment center in Kerry Town, Sierra Leone.

Then there are the clusters of white tents that rise at certain points along the road. Some, surrounded by mud walls, are community care centers — holding places for those suspected of having Ebola. Others, set farther apart from the villages, along large gravel roads, are treatment centers enclosed by chain-link fences.

One treatment facility, outside the city of Lunsar, sits near a fork in the road; the western branch leads to Port Loko, where Ebola transmission “remains persistent and intense”, the World Health Organization said on November 26. (Seventy-two new Ebola cases were reported in Port Loko during the week ending on November 23, .)

An Ebola treatment center near Lunsar opened two days ago,

The treatment center near Lunsar is run by the International Medical Corps and opened just two days ago; yesterday, six patients arrived. But there still are not enough treatment facilities for everyone who needs them in Sierra Leone. Although foreign governments, including the United Kingdom and China, have committed to construct new treatment centers in the country, progress is slow. Just 11 of the 700 additional treatment beds pledged by the United Kingdom in September were operational as of November 27, the charity reported today.

Tomorrow, I’ll be visiting a town hit hard by Ebola to see how communities are coping with this lack of resources.

DECEMBER 1, 2014: MIXED SIGNALS

As the approaches the one-year mark, there are signs of hope — such as these survivors. And the epidemic, which has claimed upwards of 5,600 lives, is finally stabilizing in Guinea, Liberia and parts of Sierra Leone, according to the World Health Organization. Health officials are congratulating themselves: “The global response has successfully turned this crisis around,” Anthony Banbury, head of the United Nations Mission for Emergency Ebola Response, told a press conference in Freetown today.

This map shows the distribution of reported by the World Health Organization on November 26.

But the number of cases is still rising in some areas in Sierra Leone, , and there are still not enough treatment beds for everyone who needs them in this country. Sierra Leone is still seeing hundreds of new cases a week; 385 were reported in the week ending November 23, WHO says. And although the three survivors left the treatment center in Kerry Town today, 20 Ebola patients stayed behind.

There’s no one reason why the epidemic is still growing in parts of Sierra Leone, but a contributing factor is the difficulty of convincing people who have never experienced the disease to change the way that they live their lives, care for the sick and bury the dead.

I’ve traveled to Sierra Leone to see how these factors are playing out on the ground — and what that means for the broader Ebola response.

Workers at the center prepare to don personal protective equipment.

Smoke from an incinerator rises above Ebola wards in Kerry Town. To prevent the spread of the virus, the treatment center here burns its trash.