Sierra Leone readies for controversial ‘Ebola’ lockdown – 6 million people confined to their homes for three days

September 2014 – FREETOWN, Sierra Leone – Sierra Leone prepared Thursday, September 18, for an unprecedented 3-day nationwide lockdown to contain the deadly spread of the Ebola virus in a controversial move which experts claimed could worsen the epidemic. The population of six million will be confined to their homes from midnight (0000 GMT) going into Friday as almost 30,000 volunteers go door-to-door uncovering patients and bodies hidden in people’s homes. “Rain or shine, the shutdown exercise is going to go ahead. During the three days… the job is going to get done,” said Steven Gaojia, head of the government’s emergency operation centre. The worst-ever outbreak of Ebola has claimed more than 500 lives in Sierra Leone, one of three countries at the epicenter of the epidemic which has so far killed almost 2,500. “Ose to Ose Ebola Tok – house-to-house Ebola talk” in the widely-spoken Krio language – will see more than 7,000 volunteer teams of four visiting the country’s 1.5 million homes. They will hand out bars of soap and information on how to prevent infection, as well as setting up “neighborhood watch”-style community Ebola surveillance teams. The government has said the teams will not enter people’s homes and are not tasked with collecting patients or bodies, but will call emergency services or burial teams “if by chance the teams happen to bump into such situations.” Extra beds have been set up at schools and hospitals across the country, including 200 around Freetown, with the government projecting a 15 to 20 percent upsurge of cases as new patients are discovered.

Curfew ‘could backfire badly.’ The ministry of health has enlisted 14 burial teams across the Western Area, which includes the capital, and a fleet of motorcyclists to bike specimens from dead bodies straight to laboratories. Community activists and civil society leaders have been recruited to help thousands of police and soldiers enforce the curfew. Health workers, the emergency services and other security forces will be exempt, along with the media and other professionals deemed key workers, while air passengers have been given special dispensation to get to Freetown’s airport. The president was due to launch the shutdown in a televised address to the nation expected on Thursday evening which he has asked tribal chiefs to repeat across the country. Experts warned however that coercive measures to stem the epidemic, such as confining people to their homes, could backfire badly and would be extremely hard to implement effectively. Jean-Herve Bradol, a former director of medical aid group Medecins sans Frontiers (MSF) and an emergency physician with experience of working in Africa, said the goal seemed “highly unrealistic. The country doesn’t have the capacity to visit every household in just three days,” he told the Agence France-Presse (AFP). MSF, known in the English-speaking world as Doctors Without Borders, said health workers would find it extremely difficult to accurately identify cases through door-to-door screening. It warned that lockdowns and quarantines may end up driving people underground “and jeopardize the trust between people and health providers. This leads to the concealment of potential cases and ends up spreading the disease further,” it said in a statement. –Rappler