Day: November 1, 2014

If you want the inside scoop about what's happening with the Ebola outbreak, then just hangout at the Mamba Point Hotel in Monrovia. It's packed with scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, international reporters and a bunch of guys and gals in camouflage from the U.S. Army. They all like to hang out at the bar during lunch time. That's where I met Joel Montgomery, a top epidemiologist at the CDC. We head off to a quiet side room, and he starts telling me about all of his trips to Monrovia. "When I was here in August, not to sound like, making this too colorful but, I mean there were ... literally dead people on the streets," Montgomery says. "And the burial teams were picking up 50 to 60 bodies a day." At that point, the country had been on a devastating path. Clinics were stretched way past capacity. And even getting an Ebola test could take days, or weeks if you lived in the jungle. Samples had to be sent by a series of canoes and motorcycles to the only lab in the country. The epidemic was doubling every few weeks. Some computational biologists were predicting more than 20,000 cases by the end of October. But officials are seeing a very different situation on the ground now. The country has had about 6,500 cases. New cases are on a decline, dropping off by about a 100 a week, on average, since early October.