The army blockaded on Thursday rural areas in Sierra Leone that have been hit by the deadly Ebola virus, a senior officer said, after neighbouring Liberia declared a state of emergency to tackle the worst outbreak of the disease on record.
Worried Liberians queued at banks and stocked up on food in markets in the capital Monrovia while others took buses to unaffected parts of the West African country after President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf announced late on Wednesday the actions that will last for 90 days.
The state of emergency allows Liberia’s government to curtail civil rights and deploy troops and police to impose quarantines on badly affected communities as it tries to contain the epidemic, which has hit Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia and Nigeria.
“Everyone is afraid this morning,” civil servant Cephus Togba told Reporters. “Big and small they are all panicking. Everyone is stocking up the little they have.”
With troops setting up checkpoints outside Monrovia on the way to some of the worst-hit towns, Johnson-Sirleaf said the state of emergency was necessary for “the very survival of our state and for the protection of the lives of our people”.
In Washington, D.C., a Liberian official said the country’s health care system was collapsing with hospitals closing, medical workers fleeing and people dying of common diseases because they are afraid to seek treatment.
“What is happening is the entire health sector is being devastated by the crisis. It is not only a killer, but it kills those who care for them, and a good number of them are dying,” Minister of Foreign Affairs Augustine Kpehe Ngafuan said in an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
In Geneva, World Health Organization (WHO) experts were due to hold a second day of meetings to agree on emergency measures to tackle the highly contagious virus and whether to declare an international public health emergency.
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