Sierra Leone released 55 people from quarantine on Wednesday after declaring them free of the Ebola virus, leaving only four in isolation, officials and medical sources said.
Medics were however urgently seeking to contact 50 others for testing, most of them from the northern town of Kambia, according to the health ministry spokesperson Harold Williams.
Sierra Leone was forced to re-open its Ebola treatment centres and relaunch screening systems, including checkpoints on motorways after two new cases of the tropical virus were confirmed late last month.
“Forty-eight people are still classified as missing and 18 of them are high risk,” he said, appealing for them to come forward.
“We are only concerned about whether they are infected so that we can treat them to avoid any possible spreading of the virus,” he said.
The four that were left in isolation were scheduled to be released on February 11.
After their release, the town erupted in jubilation with hundreds of people taking to the streets in t-shirts reading “Stop Ebola” and “Ebola cannot defeat us”, some carrying huge amplifiers blaring traditional music while others blew horns carved out of elephant tusks.
“It is good to breathe fresh air outside quarantine and rejoin friends and relatives to resume normal life,” said Foday Kandeh, a 68 year-old farmer who grows groundnuts and said he’d missed drinking palm wine.
“It is an ordeal I never want to re-live,” said Kadi Sesay, a 19-year-old student.
“Besides missing classes for 21 days, the quarantine period brought all of us together.The happy ending is that none of us tested positive but our thoughts went into overdrive thinking…;what if we had it,” she said.
The deadliest outbreak in the history of the tropical virus wrecked the economies and health systems of the three worst-hit West African nations after it emerged in southern Guinea 2013.
The outbreak infected almost 29 000 people and killed more than 11,300, mainly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
