Ebola: Sierra Leone quarantines a million people

Sierra Leone has put three more districts under isolation in a bid to halt spread of the Ebola virus disease (EVD), taking the number of people quarantined in the African country to more than a million, media reports said Thursday.

President Ernest Bai Koroma in a nationwide radio and TV broadcast Wednesday said the government decided to isolate Port Loko and Bombali districts in the north and Moyamba district in the south of the country with immediate effect, which means that nearly a third of the country's population across 14 districts is now "under curfew", The Guardian said in a report.

These decisions, according to the president, were taken in consultation with all the partners and "with our people's avowed commitment to support the extra measures to end the Ebola outbreak", Xinhua reported.

EVD has claimed nearly 3,000 lives in African countries since early this year.

Koroma announced that six chiefdoms each in the Bombali and Port Loko districts and three chiefdoms in the Moyamba district have also been isolated, and that residents in these chiefdoms must not travel to any other chiefdom until further notice.

The government has also set up corridors for travel between non-quarantined districts, with a curfew on all travel from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and curbs on travellers alighting within the quarantined area. Koroma said the isolation would "definitely pose great difficulties for our people in these districts, but the life of every one and the survival of our country take precedence over these difficulties."

He said names of hotspots to be quarantined in the capital city Freetown and three other districts in the country would be announced later.