As Uganda fights an Ebola outbreak, two regions have been placed under a three-week lockdown.
President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda has made a significant U-turn in response to this most recent outbreak, which has claimed the lives of 19 people out of the 58 cases that have been reported.
However, as bars, nightclubs, places of worship, and entertainment venues will be shut down in Mubende and the neighbouring Kassanda, the actual number of fatalities and cases may be greater.
Early in September, the outbreak started in Mubende, which has remained the epicentre; it is roughly 80 kilometres (50 miles) from Kampala, the country’s capital.
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Lockdowns had previously been disregarded by President Museveni, who said that since Ebola was not an airborne virus, it did not necessitate the same precautions as Covid-19.
However, he stopped all travel to and from the regions of Mubende and Kassanda on Saturday for a period of 21 days.
According to him, only cargo trucks will be permitted to enter and exit the restricted regions; all other forms of transportation would cease.
The president also forbade traditional healers from taking on cases and ordered police to detain anyone suspected of having the virus but refusing to isolate. Healers have been linked to the virus’s hotspots of propagation in earlier outbreaks.
In this epidemic, a 24-year-old man from Mubende was the first fatality to be reported. His family lost six further members.
Later, it made its way to Kampala, the capital, where one death was reported in October. The man who died, however, had travelled from Mubende, according to health officials, who claimed that the city was virus-free.
The Sudan form of the virus, for which there is no licenced vaccination, is the cause of this most recent outbreak. The Zaire strain, which caused an outbreak that killed 11,000 individuals in West Africa between 2013 and 2016,
