With over 8,600 dead, governments and aid agencies are now giving a timeline on when they might reach zero casesand they’re saying that could be in just a few months.
That there are just a handful of cases left now in Liberia is an incredible feat, but it has come at an equally incredible cost.
And Ebola is still critically dangerous. Hotspots remain. Sierra Leone has some 117 confirmed cases, most in the west of the country around the capital and Port Loco where the disease spreads through overcrowded slums.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) said last week that only half the cases in Liberia and Guinea came from known Ebola contacts, which suggests that hidden cases are causing outbreaks.
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Josephine Conteh says she is “happy” to be working as a nurse at the Pate Bana Maran Community Care Centre in Sierra Leone. “My conscience — if I saved one person here, I’m thinking that I have saved the whole nation. That makes me feel good.”
The Ebola outbreak has helped create some hastily pulled together infrastructure which could form the building blocks of a more robust healthcare system in these three traumatised countries.
And the disease leaves behind people galvanised for action as a result of their ordeal.
Now the question is how to use these resources to transition from an emergency response situation to more sustainable healthcare provision in the future.
