Deadly Disappointment Awaits at Ebola Clinics Due to Lack of Space
Sick Patients Are Turned Away; At Least 1,515 Hospital Beds Needed in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea
By Drew Hinshaw
WSJ.com
Sept. 7, 2014
Milton Mulbon arrived in a taxi at the gates of an Ebola clinic in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, with his 24-year-old daughter, Patience, bleeding in the back seat. Guards turned them away.
“They’re telling me no space?” he protested, the taxi parked nearby. “She’s lying down in there almost at the point of death!”
Taxis, ambulances, and even men pushing their sick in wheelbarrows are crisscrossing Monrovia, looking for an open bed in West Africa’s overbooked Ebola clinics, health-care workers say. Sometimes they get in, through persistence and good timing. Mostly they don’t.
Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea—the three nations bearing the brunt of the outbreak—need at least 1,515 hospital beds for the more than 20,000 people who could be infected before the outbreak can be curtailed, according to World Health Organization estimates. At present, there are only a few hundred beds. International support has been slow to come and is just beginning to address this specific problem, with the U.S. promising 1,000 additional beds in a new aid package.
The shortage is so dire that ambulances have picked up people raging with the symptoms of Ebola, driven them around for hours, then dropped them back at home, medical workers say.
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