Ebola lockdown in Sierra Leone: nationwide three-day curfew
Unprecented national shutdown, with health workers going house-to-house to identify Ebola cases; MSF raises concerns about capacity to cope
Monica Mark
The Guardian
Wednesday 17 September 2014
Residents across Sierra Leone, one of three countries at the centre of the biggest ever Ebola outbreak, scrambled on Wednesday to prepare for a three-day, unprecedented nationwide “lockdown” in a radical step intended to curb the spread of the killer virus, but which some health experts believe could worsen the epidemic.
Citizens will not be allowed to leave their homes from Thursday until Sunday. Known as “ose to ose” in the widely-used local Krio, health workers will also go house-to-house identifying cases and raising awareness. More than 2,300 have died across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in the nine-month epidemic that the World Bank warned this week could lead to deaths in the “tens of thousands” if unchecked by the end of the year.
Some 21,000 people have been recruited to enforce the lockdown, bulking up thousands of police and soldiers already deployed to quarantine districts in the worst-hit regions near the border with Guinea. But some international health experts have advised against the move, citing both practical concerns and disastrous attempts at the mass quarantine of the biggest slum in neighbouring Liberia.
Isolating communities has succeeded in some rural areas in past outbreaks in Central Africa. But last month, West Point, a sprawling neighbourhood in Liberia’s capital Monrovia, exploded in days of riots that led to at least one death after the army poured in, showing the challenges of trying to quell a disease that has never before reached urban areas.
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