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For weeks it has been the same here in Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown. Every day the Ebola burial teams - now well organised and promptly dispatched - collect about 60 bodies from around the city and its crowded suburbs.
Some days it is 50, sometimes as many as 80.
About 20% of those bodies turn out to be Ebola cases. The rest are just the usual range of deaths you might expect in a large city in West Africa. Every death is now treated as suspicious.
There is an air of brisk efficiency at the workers' base - the British Council offices, on a hill overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, now transformed into an Ebola command centre for the western region of Sierra Leone.
Calls are logged, white boards filled, statistics for the past month collated by close-knit teams.
Down the hill, at the municipal cemetery, bulldozers are busy clearing new ground, scraping away mounds of rubbish to give the gravediggers more space.
"At the moment we're having some success in holding on to the epidemic and I don't see the more astronomical predictions coming through at the moment," said British army Colonel Andy Garrow
Dying at home
And yet, as the weeks go by and the body collection teams continue to bring in the same number of corpses, Col Garrow finds himself drawn increasingly to one particular conclusion.
"Behaviour change," he says. Or rather the lack of it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-30279932
Some days it is 50, sometimes as many as 80.
About 20% of those bodies turn out to be Ebola cases. The rest are just the usual range of deaths you might expect in a large city in West Africa. Every death is now treated as suspicious.
There is an air of brisk efficiency at the workers' base - the British Council offices, on a hill overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, now transformed into an Ebola command centre for the western region of Sierra Leone.
Calls are logged, white boards filled, statistics for the past month collated by close-knit teams.
Down the hill, at the municipal cemetery, bulldozers are busy clearing new ground, scraping away mounds of rubbish to give the gravediggers more space.
"At the moment we're having some success in holding on to the epidemic and I don't see the more astronomical predictions coming through at the moment," said British army Colonel Andy Garrow
Dying at home
And yet, as the weeks go by and the body collection teams continue to bring in the same number of corpses, Col Garrow finds himself drawn increasingly to one particular conclusion.
"Behaviour change," he says. Or rather the lack of it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-30279932
