Sealy Bo Transcript

Sealy Bo Transcript

The second team that followed our team, that was the last team in Kenema to do lab work and they transitioned to Bo. Doctors Without Borders set up--as we were leaving they were finishing up setting up an Ebola treatment center in Bo, which is about an hour away from Kenema. They wanted a lab there and so the team lead after me said okay--because they knew they were going to shut down Kenema Government Hospital because it was a nightmare as far as infection rates and everything. The IFRC, the International Federation of the Red Cross, had set up a treatment center outside of Kenema so they were able to close Kenema Government Hospital, use it as maybe a holding facility while they sent patients to the IFRC treatment center about fifteen minutes outside of Kenema, or to Bo to MSF. The lab transition from Kenema to Bo basically end of September, the beginning of October. No interruption in testing, so they did one run in the morning in Kenema and then the afternoon run in Bo.

Q: Same day?

SEALY: Same day, mm-hmm, and that was still when--so we didn't have--so, the extraction machine that we had out there at the time in Kenema, we only brought two fifteen-sample extractors. One of them stopped working and so we were just doing one fifteen extractor and so you could do back-to-back extractions on that. But then by the time October came around, it was clear that we were going to need to bring out the big guns and bring out the big ninety-six-sample extractor. So I shipped that out to Sierra Leone and actually the first team to use that was my subsequent trip back, my second trip back in November. That was when we first started using the ninety-six, really high throughput extraction method was in November and that was basically the--so I got out there the beginning of November.

This time I was actually the team lead for the lab, so it was myself and three other women, so this was, again, also the first all-female team to go out [note: Team Five].They kind of made a big deal about that. It was at the height of the epidemic in Sierra Leone. We were averaging ninety-eight samples a day, is what my team actually averaged that month of November, so having that ninety-six-well extractor was wonderful. At that point we were actually testing samples from nine out of fourteen districts. The Bo lab was testing most of the country with the exception of Freetown, Port Loko, Kambia and Kailahun. Those were the only districts that we were not testing. The Canadians were in Kailahun and there were a few labs, Chinese, the South Africans in Freetown and then Public Health England came on board around that time. It was a very busy time. I mean we were seeing about 60% positivity rate every day. It was long hours, crazy work, but the MSF facility in Bo was phenomenal. They were wonderful to work with, the doctors were wonderful to work with. I can't say anything bad about MSF, they were just fantastic partners. Basically we set up a lab, we just had a house. It was a great situation and then we had the team that transitioned basically over to Bo. The hot lab basically ended up being just a little shack outside of a house. In between the helipad and the house was our little shack, hot room shack, and it was just basically tarp, it was tin roof and some tarp and that was our hot lab. We all wore the PPE [personal protective equipment] and everything in there to do the samples and we had an area blocked off where nobody could walk through and walk by. Once the samples were finished in the hot lab, basically the blood or the swab, whatever sample we got, usually blood or swab samples from corpses, that goes into an extraction buffer which inactivates the virus. That testing was all done here by myself actually to make sure that it actually does kill Ebola, does kill the virus.