How the World’s Deadliest Ebola Outbreak Unfolded (full documentary) | FRONTLINE

foreign [Music] the inside story of how the Ebola virus spread its sure craziness like watching a zombie movie and the global failure to stop it the world has never faced anything like this we've never prepared for it Ebola was not an exception Ebola is a precedent everybody [Music] I got a call saying that there is a walker on his way down to Market like here and see the crowd of people screaming and shouting I can see that he's afraid as he has picked up a rock and is waving it around followed by a lot of people telling us do you have to take him down he is affecting our community we don't know where he's going [Applause] [Music] the pressure from the crowd is mounting they're yelling at us so the guys in the suits wrestle him to the ground and lifts him into the back of the pickup [Applause] it was like watching a zombie movie or something it's just crazy it's pure craziness where am I how did I end up here because it's just a bad dream uh no it wasn't it was for real [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] the children of miliendo Village discovered hundreds of bats nesting in a hollow tree they had no idea that bats are suspected of carrying a deadly virus nobody knows for sure but the villagers now think that this is where it all began [Music] minda foreign [Music] foreign [Music] his sister died nine days later then his mother fell ill she was seven months pregnant this is salty is here foreign foreign a traditional healer gathered everyone together including more family members who had become sick a villager filmed the ceremony on his cell phone is the next victim emile's grandmother left the village to seek treatment she infected a nurse at a local hospital the sickness began to spread across the forest region of Guinea for three months was mistaken for cholera and malaria by March the virus had traveled hundreds of miles and killed more than 50 people the government sent a team of scientists to investigate and take blood samples the doctor tracked down a teenager named Khalil who was sick with the mystery disease his colleagues started filming on an iPad clinicia foreign [Music] foreign [Music] 's blood would later be tested the results Ebola [Music] Virginia [Music] the government of Guinea had no idea how to respond all previous Ebola outbreaks had occurred over a thousand miles away but the relief group Doctors Without Borders had Decades of experience with Ebola within 48 hours they set up a field Hospital in the town of geckadu the epicenter of the outbreak the first patients began to arrive [Music] most of those cases came from different Villages or different areas in the city of kekedu that's a very bad sign because it means that you don't have just one cluster or one family or one Village that is hit it means that it's already spread out [Music] past outbreaks had shown that the key to stopping Ebola was to isolate the sick monitor anyone who had contact with the infected and safely bury the dead this complex operation needed a level of Manpower and coordination beyond the resources of Doctors Without Borders I remember my headquarters asked me like what do you think is it five villagers or ten Villages or 15 Villages or more I remember I said if I have to choose between those three options I do believe it's 15 or more and I said like I think we have a big problem the World Health Organization who is part of the United Nations and has a mandate to help governments coordinate their response to outbreaks we thought okay here is a disease that we have dealt with for a number of decades before and you know in our own mind we had the idea that Ebola was something which was severe but typically occurred in a certain way and then could be handled but at that time we didn't really know how complex it was going to become the who left the response in the hands of its officials in Guinea who had no experience of Ebola they set up what would become daily meetings with the government of Guinea Doctors Without Borders and other Aid organizations those daily meetings were a nightmare every day every day day after day this organized meeting no decision taken no one knowing what they were talking about who people were really not at the level required for the job their coordinator never worked on Ebola before and WDSU was really downsizing the scale of the epidemic immediately I thought those people are useless they don't even understand what they're supposed to do here although it's a very important technical agency our powers are limited when we're operating in countries the countries Take the Lead we advise honestly and this is what we try to do in Guinea the outbreak quickly spread 400 miles to Guinea's Capital Conakry Doctors Without Borders top Ebola experts spoke out um the government of Guinea accused the group of sowing panic foreign foreign [Music] the Ministry of Health now ordered its teams in the field to include only laboratory confirmed cases of Ebola in their death count um number the car problems the Ministry of Health teams now stopped investigating deaths that weren't confirmed Ebola cases some of those deaths were in villages right on the international border between Guinea and Sierra Leone locals cross freely between the countries every day luisi kamano lived in Sierra Leone but in March she came to stay with relatives in Guinea her mother had Ebola and had already crossed the border twice since she got infected [Music] [Music] when Louisa felt sick too she was frightened by rumors that foreign doctors were killing people foreign the border with Sierra Leone there were no checkpoints no immigration police foreign like her mother before her Luigi had crossed the border carrying the sickness with her no one knew it yet but Ebola was spreading in Sierra Leone [Applause] [Music] a few days after her journey the who got a tip off that louisie was sick and had crossed into Sierra Leone Louise's name and location were logged in an internal report and passed on to the Sierra Leone government we did bring Louise to the attention of the Sierra Leone government and then came back and told us that Louise had gone back to guinea and that he was no she was not in Sierra Leone that was the last that we had of this particular case the Sierra Leone government says it was never informed about luisi what's certain is that Ebola was soon spreading through her home Village one of those to fall sick was a renowned traditional healer known as mendinor delande penate on April 8th mendenor died and her body was prepared for burial the corpse of an Ebola victim is highly infectious but in West Africa it's customary for villagers to spend hours washing and preparing the body for the funeral foreign [Music] [Music] these traditional burial practices played a major role in the spread of the virus mourners often touch the body at the funeral itself [Music] foreign [Music] foreign the healer's funeral was a catastrophe set off a chain reaction of infections that would lead to thousands of deaths [Music] the outbreak was already raging in Guinea and now it began to spread unchecked through the Villages of Sierra Leone wiping out entire families the healer's niece even took the virus 250 miles to Monrovia the capital of Liberia nobody yet knew it but the outbreak was completely out of control [Music] for more than a month the government of Sierra Leone missed the deaths in its border villages Doctors Without Borders says it tried to get the government to pay attention but Sierra Leone had turned for advice to an American company called metabiota who had a long-standing presence in the country researching tropical diseases metabiota had no experience in controlling Ebola outbreaks I said this our bike will not last more than few weeks when that was after we identified the first week the first two weeks we said okay that's a normal Outback we are confident it will be over in three months we were getting advice from metal biota and our complacency set in what can I say they yes it was Ebola but the magnitude had not hit us so we took steps at that time that were advised by metabiota but we never knew that it was weird to be so big the government decided to treat Ebola victims at the state hospital in the town of kanama which already had a ward for loss of fever disease similar to Ebola but less infectious but within days the hospital was overrun with patients [Music] then the nurses started to die [Music] if you go to the Mob you see dead bodies 15 16 17 18 dead bodies all in in body bags then I start to wonder what is happening maybe this is the end of the world maybe everybody is going to die far from containing the outbreak the hospital was helping to spread it will pulley a British nurse volunteered to work on the Ebola award when a patient arrived they'd walk in past these corpses that would be piling up across the path and sometimes next to the path was smelling quite bad until the barrel team came and it might take days [Music] I was constantly gobsmacked that this wasn't a bigger deal like people people weren't you know this wasn't being shouted out the government called in Doctors Without Borders but the plan was to build a dedicated Ebola clinic in the neighboring District the group says that the government and their advisors metabiota were still underestimating the scale of the problem problems too is [Music] the right organization to be no sure we are not specialized in outbreak response we know how to do it because we have some kind of expertise in the domain but we are too small I mean we are a very small company the government and metabiota had no system in place to monitor people who had been in contact with Ebola victims this lack of contact tracing meant that hundreds of cases went undetected contact tracing houses where we got a troll we've wasted like a month in a month it's a disaster yes we wasted time lose a lot of lives and we would have done much better and we really followed up the chain of transmission better it was wrong yeah [Music] the outbreak had now spread to three countries Guinea Sierra Leone and Liberia some of the poorest nations in the world four neighboring countries risked infection at any moment the who was considering declaring an international Health Emergency we would have acted as a global distress signal but officials were concerned about causing panic at that time I think all of us thoughts wait a minute let's be cautious let's see how it evolves we are deploying people in the field we think we are making head with if I went back to June 2014 I'll probably be saying something entirely different I'll probably be standing up and calling my director General and saying please do it the who opened a new coordination Center in Guinea to try to improve the response across West Africa there was absolutely no change at field level still the very same few organization on the ground doing the work no additional people coming to support more people at coordination level more useless people more meetings to be organized but on the ground in the field impact zero Hospital in Sierra Leone was now overwhelmed the who had sent two doctors to help with the caseload the patients kept coming and the nurses kept getting infected I think you'd have to be crazy to think that anything but shutting that place down would be the thing to do and everyone knew that's what needed to happen and that should have happened months before that and had that have happened there's a whole cohort of nurses lab techs and cleaners that wouldn't have died so many lives would have been saved there were now so many deaths at the hospital that wild rumors started to spread through the town this crazy woman came home as two rides at the center of the town in the marketplace and started shouting there is no Ebola I said this woman was shouting I am a nurse I am telling you people that we are just standing by doing cannibalism we are the one that are killing people we are removing their parts [Applause] [Music] [Applause] and everybody in the marketplace the a wire running come and see the nurse come and see a nurses confessing [Applause] now everybody started throwing stones at us they said we are going to the hospital we are going to burn the academy government Hospital down I was walking up to the unit and there was this stream of nurse nurse passed me in the other direction and I could hear this mob an angry mob it's a it's a really uh it's a unique sound and uh who they all evacuated so they all got into their cars and drove off leaving just a handful of people probably inside the whole hospital really when when there was a risk of the hospital being overrun the police used tear gas to disperse the crowd [Music] the streets went quiet for now but Sierra Leone was on the brink of Chaos the outbreak had now killed more than 800 people in three countries as the death count Rose Doctors Without Borders had been urging the who to declare an international emergency regards the control I said that I've been telling the world for the last few months that it's a unprecedented out of control Ebola epidemic I don't have the authority people don't listen to me but you you need to step up and declare it because you have the authority and you have the legitimacy we felt that if you simply go around and say things are out of control or they're this way or whatever in a categorical way it really doesn't help and at this time we knew that we had something which was not ordinary but we are not dealing yet with a full-blow um you know Global crisis then the outbreak moved to another level an infected Liberian took the virus to Nigeria Africa's most populous country and two American health workers forced Ebola into the headlines around the world in from the CDC confirmed the first Ebola case diagnosed who infected missionaries flown from Liberia and in isolation at an Atlanta Hospital the who declared an international emergency I am declaring the current outbreak of Ebola virus disease a public health emergency of international concern the committee acknowledges the serious and unusual nature of the outbreak and the potential for further International spread the who now put a high-level team in Geneva in charge of the response they came up with a plan that would require thousands of Western Medics and experts to be put into action listen to we were looking at one of the most dangerous pathogens that we knew growing at an exponential rate across a broad geographic area something we had never seen before we needed clinical management people to go in there and manage the Ebola cases we needed Public Health expertise on the ground to be able to do the contact tracing and I realized that capacity to manage something on this scale doesn't exist the problem was the who had no standing army of emergency Medics and no Authority or budget for this kind of operation now needed to persuade wealthy countries to send people to fight the outbreak and that would take time back in West Africa the virus had found a new hunting ground West Point slum the most densely populated District of Monrovia the capital of Liberia [Music] [Music] family foreign [Music] I was called by the minister of Health to say that people were dying total total confusion chaos disbelief fear no means to response because we didn't have the knowledge we didn't have equipment we didn't have the means whereby we could attend to people did not have full awareness of how quickly this disease could spread how deadly this disease was we were confounded because it's just spread so rapidly in these communities Monrovia had one small Ebola clinic and it was full for the infected there was nowhere to go the government decided to use a school in West Point as a makeshift isolation Center for suspected Ebola cases finda whose husband had just died was forced to come here with her six children even though none of them appeared to be sick o way down come back a local journalist filmed Fender and her children in the isolation Center there was no separation between the sick and the healthy very quickly find his son sasco felt sick wife crowds were protesting but the slum was becoming a Dumping Ground for Monrovia zibola victims and once again rumors were spreading that Ebola was a hoax a conspiracy to kill poor Africans [Applause] four days after it opened the isolation Center was overrun [Music] Kane put all the pigeon out one late but I was about six to seven years old he was lying on a mattress at that time he was dead they said body on the ground and removed the mattress I couldn't believe it for human being to come Barefoot with naked hands touching even body that Ebola killed and they saw the blood on the floor they saw fluids on the floor and they are matching the fluid with their feet [Applause] [Music] the looters took mattresses and sheets contaminated with the virus and the Ebola victims disappeared back into the slums foreign foreign [Music] West Point was now out of control [Applause] citizens it has become necessary to impose additional sanctions the communities at West Point in Monrovia are quarantined on a full security watch this means there will be no movement in and out of those areas we ordered the military to quarantine the place to stop anybody from leaving our fear was people would run away and come from there and then go into other communities that's why we did that the quarantine backfired immediately the Army shot a teenage boy who later died from his wounds and the infected had nowhere to go except the streets so the virus was spreading more quickly by now one of finna's children sasco was dead the rest desperately needed help I get no prayer for any one and if I are on the street I will sleep on the street because [Music] for me not to anybody I see any secondary that is [Music] as West Point descended into chaos Doctors Without Borders had been constructing elwa-3 the biggest Ebola Hospital ever built but when it opened it was immediately clear it would not be enough Brett Adamson was the field coordinator for the clinic people were dying outside families were dying in taxi cabs outside they were arriving seeking care the families had nowhere else to go the center was full and essentially there were way you know the center was waiting for someone to die to then make space Stefan liljian was recruited on short notice to work at the clinic he had no Ebola experience I arrive under our mattresses just next to each other full of people and and they were dead and I look like Adam and okay so that's how a dead person looked like they're telling me that Stefan we can't just watch we need to go in and move bodies are you ready for it and I start to panic at my pulse goes very high there are dead bodies in there and in gruesome positions we go to the next one and there are dead bodies in there as well and we go up to a man in a in a chair a guy with a spray goes up on Eastern Springs face and that's when it really hits you now he's he's really dead and we'll place out the body bag and sip him up and we carry him away and family are crying and screaming and yelling and many are in panic that was my first day with Ebola a normal medical round for me would be going in pronouncing five or six people dead and it's extremely horrible because people are dying sometimes very distressing deaths beside a child the mother that was trying to care for her child dead and then you've got a baby and trying to work out how on Earth are you going to try and deal with an unaccompanied child in an over full Center it was really hard it's just so far beyond what could normally be expected of humanitarian workers I would say [Music] the pointlessness of it that's what it felt like you know normally if you work to the point of exhaustion you you can come away from something and feel a degree of satisfaction knowing that you did what you could I didn't feel any satisfaction at all it was never about feeling like you've failed in the level of medical Acuity we did everything we could it was about feeling the shame of what the world had to offer for Liberia at that time and yeah the sheer number of death was just really seen death after sleeping on the streets for five days Fender and her surviving children were finally picked up by an ambulance crew in West Point [Music] they were taken to the new Clinic but when they arrived there was no room for them [Music] it's just crazy to stand there and look in the face of people and tell them that there is no space it's her surreal really surreal if you had to make a choice who do you take if I have to take someone I have to take this woman that plays on the ground here she is very very sick and if I have to take someone I have to take her I can't thank you there is no space for you here today eventually The Doctors Without Borders team found room for finder and her children but by now finder's youngest boy Tamba was slipping away mama foreign eventually Fender would lose three of her children three survived by now Ebola cases were Rising exponentially Doctors Without Borders made a direct plea to the United States to provide thousands of soldiers to help isolate and treat patients [Music] the director of the U.S Centers for Disease Control and prevention came to the Ebola clinic in Monrovia to see the situation for himself still get goosebumps thinking about it and I will never forget the experience in Hour 3 I saw a level of Devastation that I've never seen I went into one of the tents and there was a woman lying on the ground she had beautifully plated hair when I looked more closely I realized that she was dead the staff were too busy trying to care for the living to even remove her it was seeing a country essentially in free fall and knowing knowing with certainty that no matter what we did it was going to get a lot worse before it got better Tom frieden called President Obama I was frankly Furious what I said was that this isn't about response in the next three months its response in the next three days that matters cases were increasing exponentially they were doubling every three weeks each month of delay would result in a tripling of cases the worlds still has an opportunity to save countless lives right now the world has the responsibility to act to step up and to do more ten months after the outbreak had begun the fight back was underway the United States sent in thousands of troops and Medics and other countries followed suit the United Nations created a new emergency mission of The Who and other agencies to coordinate the response work began building new treatment centers and training burial teams but the outbreak was still ahead of the response and even threatened to spread Beyond Africa second health care worker in Dallas has tested positive for the Ebola Public Health officials confirmed the first human to human transmission of Ebola in the U.S we definitely arrived too late I was absolutely petrified it would just be this like black plague with this inexorable spread across the continent and Beyond we're also deathly afraid that someone would get on a plane and go to Dhaka Jakarta or Johannesburg somewhere and land in an urban setting and Ebola get totally out of control we didn't have a plan B then in Monrovia something extraordinary happened cases began to drop sharply [Music] when we saw the numbers starting to go down it was really worried it was caused for more concern and Jubilation because the response still seems so inadequate that it was inconceivable that it could be successful and of course the theory is that if people are not presenting that they were staying at home which means if they're staying at home they're infecting more people that then the curve would bounce back in a much more dramatic way and that was the fear but the drop in numbers was real with death all around them liberians were changing how they lived their lives they stopped trying to nurse they're sick and began to bury their dead safely hire Monrovia knew Ebola was real Ebola kills people was going to kill me unless I do one or two things differently there was a huge fear and they changed their behaviors in ways which suddenly slowed down and took the heat out of this thing and that's why I turned it around liberians turned their country around we got in there a little bit afterward and took a lot of credit thousands more were still to die across West Africa but the changing behavior of the population and the massive International response gradually turned the tide the fight against Ebola is still far from over but Health officials are already worrying about the next outbreak and how the world will respond sometimes the world has got to learn things the hard way there are going to be more of these no matter what we think more and more new diseases are emerging we've seen pandemic flu we've seen SARS we've seen Ebola like this and we are not prepared Ebola was not an exception Ebola is a precedent officially more than 10 000 people have died the true figure is believed to be much higher [Music] 37 including doctors nurses portas cleaners Securities lab technicians 37 of them died in this Hospital nurse Rebecca Alex mogboy Nancy Yoko sister Balu Dr Khan nurse Alice IP bori is safe [Music] Hava la under David [Music] thank you for more on this and other Frontline programs visit our website at pbs.org Frontline thank you frontline's outbreak is available on DVD to order visit shoppbs.org or call 1-800 play PBS Frontline is also available for download on iTunes [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: FRONTLINE PBS | Official

Views: 2,008,101

Keywords:

Id: WG1aY5OOR2o

Length: 53min 17sec (3197 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 28 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/TesseractToo]

This is a terrifying an interesting watch now that we have a batter understanding of how pandemics can spread.

[u/Iuvenesco]

Wow. That’s a good but somewhat horrifying documentary.