Sierra Leone claims its three-day nationwide lockdown to try was a success, and will not need to be repeated.  But a growing number of fresh graves in a cemetery in the capital Freetown suggest the fatality rate is much worse than has been reported.

The UN World Health Organization (WHO) released updated numbers, saying that at least 2,793 people have died in the West African Ebola outbreak.  And they’re warning that under the current conditions, Ebola cases could hit 21,000 within the next six weeks.  Last month, those same officials acknowledged that statistics probably “vastly underestimate the magnitude of the outbreak”.

In Freetown, Sierra Leone’s King Tom Cemetery, workers have been keeping score of the new bodies coming in for burial, 110 of them in a little over a week, each a suspected Ebola victim.  And while the government claims that perhaps not every death was caused by Ebola, the bodies have been those of young people – young adults, people in early middle age, or children – with very few elderly people on the list.  And many of the bodies came from the same household, suggesting that a virulent infection had struck.