By Umaru Fofana
"The love that follows us sometime is our trouble, Which still we thank as love..." So writes Williams Shakespeare in his popular tragedy, Macbeth. The circumstance is arguably different to what obtains in what I want to explain but still a show of love destructive for those it is aimed towards protecting.
Sometime in August, or so, I was travelling to Makeni to visit my parents who had just moved house. That was two days after Lunsar - a town on the way - had been or was supposed to have been quarantined. It followed several Ebola cases and deaths reported in the area.
To my surprise Lunsar looked normal. Well...NORMAL in away. Bikes and vehicles were calling on passengers heading to Port Loko town, the district headquarter town. I asked myself whether that was a quarantined place. Some of the young men around the petrol station told me that they appealed to the leaders to "have mercy" on them and let them live, complaining that it would be hard to survive locked down for 21 days.
The "love" the authorities in Lunsar and I dare say far beyond the town meant they listened to their plea even if at the expense of the people in Lunsar and beyond. A few days later, Ebola went on the prowl in the town and in the rest of the district. It has not petered out since. It continues to get worse.
Melon Street, Wellington, Freetown. Eight-year-old Mbalu, not her real name, was left to look after her younger sister, less than one year old. Their parents and elder siblings had passed away. One by one they were snatched by Ebola. Somehow miraculously, the two were spared. At least up to last week. Two children locked in a house with no one to take care of them. Theirs is an ineluctable quarantining of their home. They are kids and cannot leave home with no one to turn to. No neighbours are willing to take them in. Never mind relatives.
Four people in the house - parents and siblings - had died one after another. The home was not quarantined. For all you know the deaths could have been mitigated if the home had been quarantined after the first death and the others taken to a treatment centre the moment they started showing signs and symptoms of Ebola. It was not.
At a place called Old Camp at Grafton, outside Freetown, people are dying without the area being quarantined. Thos alive keep moving out and about infecting others in and around the area.
Five districts are supposed to be in quarantine. It seems the quarantine in Kailahun and Kenema in the east - and of late Moyamba in the south, is far more effective than in Port Loko and Bombali in the north. A question again perhaps of "The love that follows us sometime is our trouble, Which still we thank as love..."?
A week, or so, before the entire Moyamba district was quarantined, Moyamba Junction had been isolated. I drive past there en route to Bo and it was completely deserted. Police officers were in strategic places to ensure no one stopped in the town.
Even with the area under quarantine, motorbikes ply the Makeni-Magburaka route with near ease. I have not been there since but have been consistently told by various sources that transports even leave the town for other districts.
It is quite evident that people use canoes to travel from parts of Port Loko in quarantine to Waterloo and its surroundings. Otherwise has any one wondered why the figures of deaths and new infections are spiking so much in the area? It is a question of the "The Love that follows us sometimes is our trouble..."
Because in this country citizens are not looked upon as citizens but rather as voters, the quarantine has been long and hard for the people of Kailahun and Kenema. But they put up with it and today their new infection rate is plummeting.
Now come to think of those very few homes which get quarantined in Freetown and I bet for most of the countryside, it is either grossly ineffective or residents are left to suffer as if they are being punished. The idea of quarantining homes in this Ebola is for the safety and protection of not only those living in the house but also for the broader good of the broader society and to stem the spread of the disease so those who show signs and symptoms of the disease are identified and fished out for treatment. But ours is a complete mockery of that.
When a home is quarantined for 21 days hardly do any health officials visit there to check on the condition of the residents. No health checks let alone tests are carried out on them. To my mind it is a matter of if no one dies after the 21-day incubation period - for which the quarantine lasts - they are all allowed to go about their normal business albeit abnormally, even if the signs and symptoms of Ebola have started manifesting themselves. Unless where they are honest to themselves and to society to step forward and admit to such. Otherwise they will move around and infect a lot more people.
And what happens in situations such as in which Mbalu and her younger sibling find themselves? Children orphaned in a home and left all by themselves. I am not talking of those who have recovered from the disease or who have gone through the 21-day quarantine period with adults in the home. Those whose families have been decimated leaving them all by themselves.
It has been said over and over that the current Ebola outbreak is the first time the virus has appeared in urban areas. All previous outbreaks - over 20 - were all stemmed in forest areas. The reason was containment - n addition of course to health systems that existed. Not our own dysfunctional ones.
To contain Ebola means not allowing those known or suspected to have the virus to infect others. Hence contact-tracing, which Nigeria and Senegal did o effectively that they were able to deal with their own cases. If homes cannot - or would not - be (effectively) quarantined then contact-tracing is nonexistent. Until there is a hold on contact-tracing Ebola will be with us for some to come - even if the British army complete their construction of treatment centres tomorrow and the Cuban, Sierra Leonean and US and German medics were to be deployed in them on the same day.
© Politico 28/10/14
