FREETOWN, Sierra Leone -- Streets in Sierra Leone's capital bustled again Monday after an unprecedented nationwide shutdown during which officials said more than 1 million households were checked for Ebola patients and given information on how to prevent the spread of the deadly disease.
The government delayed an announcement on how many new cases had been discovered.
Sierra Leone and Liberia, which have been hardest hit in this outbreak, have only about 20 percent of the beds they need to treat patients, according to the World Health Organization.
The Sierra Leone government has ordered tents for temporary treatment centers to make room for those additional cases, said Abdulai Bayraytay, a government spokesman.
Liberia opened a 150-bed treatment center Sunday, its largest so far, and ambulances immediately rushed patients there. By Monday, the new clinic had admitted 112 people, though only 46 of those have tested positive for Ebola, said Assistant Health Minister Tolbert Nyenswah. The rest are being held for observation and treated for other diseases, such as malaria.
Ebola, transmitted through bodily fluids, is blamed for the deaths of more than 2,800 people in West Africa, according to new figures released Monday by the World Health Organization. More than 5,800 people are believed to have been sickened in the outbreak. The vast majority of the cases and deaths have been in Liberia and Sierra Leone, with the disease also affecting Guinea, Nigeria and Senegal.
The hardest hit countries have resorted to extraordinary measures. Liberia has cordoned off entire towns or neighborhoods, and Sierra Leone's nationwide shutdown is believed to be the most sweeping lockdown against disease since the Middle Ages.
During Sierra Leone's shutdown, at least 77 bodies were buried and half of them tested positive for Ebola, said Bayraytay . Officials are waiting on laboratory tests for the other half to see whether they also died of Ebola. The disease is thought to have killed more than 600 people in Sierra Leone, a nation of 6 million.
The number of new suspected Ebola cases that were discovered during the lockdown will be announced by Sierra Leone authorities at a news conference today, originally scheduled for Monday.
Joe Amon, director of health and human rights for Human Rights Watch, said there is little reason to believe the lockdown had been effective in ending transmission since such measures are so hard to enforce. Frustrated residents complained of food shortages in some neighborhoods.
"You could argue that it's strictly necessary not because it's an effective way to break transmission, but because it's necessary to reach people with communication messages," he said.
Teams carrying soap and information about Ebola reached about 75 percent of 1.5 million households in Sierra Leone, the Health Ministry said.
Sierra Leone residents overwhelmingly complied by staying in their homes, but in one incident health workers trying to bury five bodies 12 miles east of Freetown were attacked Saturday. After police reinforcements arrived, the health workers completed the burial.
Nearly 350 health workers in West Africa have been infected, and more than half of those have died. A Spanish priest who became infected while serving as a medical director for a hospital in Sierra Leone was flown back to Spain on Monday.
There are no approved treatments or vaccines for Ebola, but officials have been trying out experimental drugs during this outbreak. The small supply of one drug, ZMapp, was exhausted after being used on a few patients.
On Monday, Tekmira Pharmaceuticals of Canada said its experimental Ebola treatment had been used for a number of patients, and regulators in the U.S. and Canada had approved its use in more. It said the drug had been well tolerated so far.
Tekmira said there were limited supplies of its TKM-Ebola drug, and because it has not been used in an actual study, the company acknowledged it is impossible to tell if it had any effect.
Officials at Nebraska Medical Center said an Ebola-infected American being treated there, Dr. Rick Sacra, was given the TKM-Ebola drug.
Information for this article was contributed by Wade Williams of The Associated Press.
A Section on 09/23/2014