Sierra Leone quarantines 1 million people due to Ebola. Yahoo/AFP

A health worker disposing of Ebola contaminated equipment. Yahoo/AFP

Sierra Leone has quarantined 1.2 million people in response to the Ebola outbreak. Yahoo/AFP. The five districts include Port Loko and Bombali in the north, Moyamba in the south and Kenema and Kailahun in the east. In addition 12 cheifdoms, smaller administrative areas, were placed under quarantine as well. The quarantine affects more then 1/3rd of the 6 million people living in Sierra Leone. The people living in these areas will not be able to leave and outsiders will not be able to enter, stranding people on either side and separating families. The quarantine comes after a country-wide three day lockdown where at least 100 bodies and 200 new cases were discovered. 

My Comment:

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Will it work? I'm not sure. Isolating and monitoring patients appeared to stop the outbreak in Nigeria and Senegal but neither of those outbreaks were on this scale. I don't see how quarantining 1.2 million people will help the people in the quarantine but I do see how it could help the disease stop spreading outside of the quarantined areas. 

But what happens when people in the people in the quarantine zone panic? Liberia tried to cut off the West Point slum and that failed spectacularly. People did everything they could to break the quarantine, including swimming in the ocean. Eventually they rioted and even thought Liberia used deadly force to quell the riot, they eventually had to break the quarantine on humanitarian grounds. Will that happen in Sierra Leone? I don't know. They were able to lock down the whole country last week so maybe the people there are more cooperative. 

Part of me thinks that this is way too little way too late. When Ebola was limited to a few cases a wide quarantine could have work but it has spread to far into too many big cites to really slow it down. More and more, for Sierra Leone and Liberia at least, I think this outbreak ends in three ways. 

1. It mutates to a less deadly or less spreadable form

2. It continues to spread in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and perhaps Guinea as well, until it infects enough people that it runs out of victims. West Africa is completely devastated and the infection spreads to other West African nations who may or may not be able to stop it before it becomes a huge problem.

3. It goes airborne and everyone dies. 

I think options #1 and #3 are equally unlikely but not outside the realm of possibility. I don't see the outbreak being contained. It's gone to far for that. It will burn out eventually but there won't be a happy ending here.