Moriarty Senegal Transcript

Moriarty Senegal Transcript

So yeah, they were like alright, you're just going to jump in. They had this case, this guy who had traveled from Guinea, from where the outbreak was biggest, and he crossed the border into Mali and no one had realized that he had Ebola for like weeks. He crossed the border, he got to this private hospital in Bamako, they didn't realize it, had a lot of contact with people, got some other people sick. This is how it happens. By the time they realized it, it was too late and he had gotten other people sick and he died. It was already kind of like this scary thing and I think because it was in Bamako, it was a huge city, they were like, this could be a complete disaster. They were really worried that it would be, and I think we're really lucky that it didn't become a disaster. I mean we responded, but you can't--we only responded as far--you know, after we knew things, which was already too late. People were very on edge and there was this whole theme because Senegal had that one case and it was fine, and Mali had had one case a few weeks before, but it was not a big--you know, it was just one single case. She died, it was sad. Nigeria had those few cases so everyone was like, are we going to become a Senegal or are we going to be a Guinea? Be a Senegal, that was the theme of the whole thing.

So we just started. We went in, and they had set up an emergency operations center, the COU [centre d'opération d'urgence ], and we were working with all kinds of--it was like, CDC was there, Doctors Without Borders, all these NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and stuff had just flooded in.