Alarmed by the world’s worst outbreak of Ebola, West Africa leaders have declared extraordinary measures to fight the disease, including closing schools, authorizing house-to-house searches for infected people and, at least on paper, sometimes vowing to go beyond the standard international controls for halting the virus.
Here in Sierra Leone, the nation with the most cases of the disease, the government has decreed a broad state of emergency ”” telling families to stay at home on Monday for “reflection, education and prayers” ”” and has ordered strict new measures, like bans on many public gatherings and the quarantine edict.
“The very essence of our nation is at stake,” President Ernest Bai Koroma said in a televised speech Monday morning.
But that tough stance is being accompanied by loose enforcement that is deeply worrying to doctors and health care workers trying to stem the rapid spread of the virus.