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Two days ago, Liberia?s national Ebola coordinator, Tolbert Nyenswah, showed me around the Emergency Operations Centre in Monrovia. It?s not a particularly glamorous place. It?s a large, hangar-like room, with long tables of people at laptops crunching numbers. The walls are covered in plans and graphs. The staff are constantly moving around, sticking pins into maps and updating the figures. It has the atmosphere of a busy call centre.
It is in rooms like this, or like the National Ebola Centre?s situation room and the Western Area Emergency Response Centre in Sierra Leone, or the Ebola Response Unit in Guinea, where the battle with Ebola will be won or lost. Because it is these systems that keep decision-makers informed about how the crisis is developing. The challenge now for the international community is to use these systems to work both harder ? by ramping up the resources to tackle the disease ? and more intelligently ? by finding the approaches that work and getting them where they?re needed, fast. We need to outsmart Ebola if we?re going to eradicate it.
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And just because we know what?s needed doesn?t mean it?s all there. In Sierra Leone for example they still only have about a fifth of the beds they?ll need by the end of the year. And, despite big improvements to the number of safe burials taking place, Paulo Conteh, the CEO of the National Ebola Response Centre, has said ?it?s going to get worse before it gets better?. So we need to keep pushing to get enough resources in place, because if we do so fast enough we can slow the spread of the disease.
We?re also learning how our response to Ebola needs to change to stay ahead of the disease. It?s not just about the size of the response; it?s about the shape too. Are the hospital beds where they need to be, or do we have empty beds in some places and too few beds in others? Do we have good management systems in some districts but not in others? If Ebola breaks out in a new area can we move resources there fast to snuff it out before it takes hold? Are the successes in one country being replicated by its neighbours? We need to be able to answer these questions to move from decelerating Ebola to destroying it.
Interesting read: more at http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...eration-centre