Ambulances transport dozens of Ebola orphans
March 13, 2015
Based on activity records we are receiving on the ambulances in Sierra Leone, the primary use of the vehicles continues to be transporting Ebola survivors and orphans back into communities.
When children are discovered to be in the home of a person infected with Ebola, they are taken into quarantine with other children at an Observational Interim Care Center (OICC). There they live until they have safely passed through the incubation period and until they can be released back home. In many cases, sadly, both parents have died from Ebola, and so the children remain at the OICC until another family member or friend has agreed to take custody of them.
In February, the ambulances delivered 130 children and survivors back into the community, with 7,700 kilometers (4,785 miles) covered.
While new Ebola cases are much lower than they were at the end of 2014, they seem to have hit a plateau, with new daily cases hovering in the low teens. Cumulative confirmed cases of the disease in Sierra Leone since the outbreak began has just crossed the 8,500 mark, and cumulative confirmed deaths are well over 3,300. See these charts from the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response for greater detail on cumulative case data in Sierra Leone.
