That headline is too flippant, because this is actually a serious situation. I mentioned a few weeks ago that there were signs the Ebola outbreak was coming under control in Liberia; well, the opposite has been true in Sierra Leone:
The outbreak of the Ebola virus continues to devastate Sierra Leone, where the number of cases are spiking and humanitarian organizations reported discovering piles of dead bodies in a remote hospital earlier this month.
“Guinea has stabilized, Liberia seems to have stabilized, but we are still spiking up,” Vandi Chidi Minah, Sierra Leone’s ambassador to the United Nations, told Newsweek on Thursday.
Minah said spikes in neglected areas that “seem to be abandoned” and have not seen the influx of resources other places have is not surprising.
Sierra Leone surpassed Liberia earlier this week in terms of total reported Ebola infections during this outbreak. The virus has managed to keep thriving in remote, rural areas of Sierra Leone, where it’s harder for aid to reach people in need and where underreporting of the disease is common.
As a result of the ongoing epidemic, the government, as my flippant headline says, has banned all public, communal celebrations over the Christmas-New Years period:
Sierra Leone has banned public celebrations over Christmas and the New Year, because of the Ebola crisis.
Soldiers are to be deployed on the streets throughout the festive period to keep people indoors, officials say.
Christmas is widely celebrated in Sierra Leone, even though Islam is the largest religion.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 