Sierra Leone residents staying home to stop Ebola

In a final effort to rid Ebola, Sierra Leone’s 6 million residents were told to stay at home for three days starting on Friday. The only exception given was for religious services.

Thousands of appointed teams were out on the search for Ebola cases as well as reminding people about how Ebola is spread and how to prevent it.

The West African nation’s streets were nearly empty on Friday except for the police on patrols and the soldiers at their checkpoints. Even though Muslims were allowed to go to Friday prayers, attendance was at an ultimate low. Christians similarly will be allowed to go to church on Sunday, according to The Washington Post.

Community health workers in the capital, Freetown, encountered both receptive and hostile people in the town. But the National Ebola Response Center said that there were no major incidents to report.

The head of Sierra Leone’s Ebola response, Alfred Palo Conteh, said that one of their major goals was to fight complacency as they are passing into more than a year after the Ebola outbreak was declared in West Africa.

“We understand that people are tired and want to get back to their normal life, but we’re not there yet. It’s the final meters in the race,” said Roeland Monasch of UNICEF.

So far, nearly 12,000 people in Sierra Leone have been infected by Ebola, more than any other country, even though they have resorted to some of the most rigorous measures to stop the disease.

During this yearlong outbreak so far, over 10,000 people have believed to have died, mostly in West Africa.

According to the World Health Organization, that even though there has been a dramatic reduction in infections over the past few weeks, there were still 33 new cases confirmed in Sierra Leone alone last week.

But the outbreak is most disturbing in Guinea, where it is driven by hidden cases. Liberia’s last remaining Ebola case who became infected weeks after the last previous patient had recovered, died on Friday.

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