Sierra Leone finds 130 new ebola cases in 3-day lockdown

Sierra Leone recorded 130 new cases of the ebola virus during a three-day lockdown, and it is waiting for test results on a further 39 suspected cases, said Stephen Gaojia, head of the Ebola Emergency Operations Centre.

The country had ordered its six million citizens to stay indoors until Sunday night in the most extreme strategy employed by a West African nation since the start of an epidemic that has infected 5,762 people since March and killed 2,793 of those.

“The exercise has been largely successful ... The outreach was just overwhelming. There was massive awareness of the disease,” Gaojia said, noting that authorities reached more than 80% of the households they had intended to target.

Sierra Leone now needs to focus on treatment and case management. “We need clinicians, epidemiologists, lab technicians, infection-control practitioners and nurses,” he said.

The fever, which has struck mainly in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, is the worst since ebola was identified in 1976 in the forests of central Africa. At least 562 have died in Sierra Leone.

The lockdown was intended to allow 30,000 health workers, volunteers and teachers to visit every household. Some said it might have a negative impact on the poor.

Meanwhile, European countries are assessing what resources they have to help fight ebola and are planning a coordinated response to the worst outbreak of the virus in history, Italy’s health minister Beatrice Lorenzin said on the sidelines of a meeting.

The European Union has pledged €140m to reinforce the fight.

“Only four or five countries in Europe are equipped. We will work together to coordinate the aid effort,” she said as EU health ministers met in Milan. There have been no cases of ebola in Italy, but EU citizens who contracted the disease in Africa have been repatriated.