Yesterday marked one week since the diagnosis of Ebola was announced.  In that week we moved from thoughtful concern to alarm to grief to acceptance of the daily reality of work. As soon as we heard the news last Thursday Scott was setting up chlorine and gloves at the health center and communicating with MSF and Ministry of Health, and holding meetings with our team to inform and calm.

A week ago today the advance team flew in and out.  In the first few days help seemed to come in slowly, this is a remote place, not easy to access with tons of supplies.  It took time for the experts to set up barriers and isolate people, to train staff on protective techniques.
 
In those first days we felt the crunch of panicked patients, fearful and sometimes absent staff. But now a week into the response the sheer volume of people who have arrived is astonishing. We find ourselves moving more and more to the periphery as agencies much bigger than ours, and people with more power and experience take over.  And the non-Ebola medical needs are becoming more difficult to quantify as people stay home, afraid.

The Friday Numbers:

•    Cummulative cases: 104
•    Deaths: 23
•    Contacts (people with significant exposure to the virus by caring for someone       sick): 328
•    Contacts checked today to make sure they are not sick: 155 (65%, pretty amazing considering the topography).
•    Medical Staff: ever increasing. 4 MOH nurses and 1 doctor with experience from the Gulu epidemic in 2000, and 3 MSF nurses, expected imminently.
•    Admissions: 3 at Bundibugyo hospital, one of which died right away. 0 in Kikyo.
•    Census on the Isolation wards: 24 in Bundibugyo, 16 in Kikyo.
•    Healing, or nearly ready for discharge: 4 in Bundibugyo, 2 in Kikyo, plus Dr. Sessanga who has essentially discharged himself from his self-imposed isolation. Scott saw him today and took a lab tech to get his blood sample for the CDC. This is hopeful. People do recover. One of the epidemiologists said she counts only 4 deaths among 18 admissions, which is less than a quarter, similar to the deaths among the confirmed positive lab samples in the original batch that led to the identification of the epidemic (2 of 8).