NYTimes | MAKENI,
Sierra Leone — “Where’s the corpse?” the burial-team worker shouted,
kicking open the door of the isolation ward at the government hospital
here. The body was right in front of him, a solidly built young man
sprawled out on the floor all night, his right hand twisted in an
awkward clench.
The
other patients, normally padlocked inside, were too sick to look up as
the body was hauled away. Nurses, some not wearing gloves and others in
street clothes, clustered by the door as pools of the patients’ bodily
fluids spread to the threshold. A worker kicked another man on the floor
to see if he was still alive. The man’s foot moved and the team kept
going. It was 1:30 in the afternoon.
In
the next ward, a 4-year-old girl lay on the floor in urine, motionless,
bleeding from her mouth, her eyes open. A corpse lay in the corner — a
young woman, legs akimbo, who had died overnight. A small child stood on
a cot watching as the team took the body away, stepping around a little
boy lying immobile next to black buckets of vomit. They sprayed the
body, and the little girl on the floor, with chlorine as they left.
As
the Ebola epidemic intensifies across parts of West Africa, nations and
aid agencies are pledging to respond with increasing force. But the
disease has already raced far ahead of the promises, sweeping into areas
that had been largely spared the onslaught and are not in the least
prepared for it.
The consequences in places like Makeni, one of Sierra Leone’s largest cities, have been devastating.
“The
whole country has been hit by something for which it was not ready,”
said Dr. Amara Jambai, director of prevention and control at Sierra
Leone’s health ministry.
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