May this be the final patient!

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), over the weekend, reported that Sierra Leone will discharge her last Ebola patient today during a ceremony that is to be attended by His Excellency the President, Ernest Bai Koroma. I hope this will be the final Ebola patient.

This country now deserves a final end of Ebola after all the destruction the dreaded killer disease has caused. Apart from ravaging our economy and polluting our tradition and culture, the disease in less than two years has claimed the lives of nearly four thousand people in the country among them fifteen senior and renowned medical doctors. For such a country to be discharging a final Ebola patient is very good news worth celebrating.

But we should not yet celebrate the good news as Ebola is a very unpredictable and mysterious disease that can reappear even after disappearing for months. The disease re-surged in Liberia after the country had gone for months without recording a single case. So, the discharge of the last Ebola patient today should not be misconstrued as the end of Ebola. We should still remain vigilant for any eventuality.

Even after the World Health Organization will have declared this country Ebola-free, we should not immediately start burying the dead; we should not dismantle the Ebola check points and treatment centers. Ebola is a disease that can resurrect at anytime and anywhere even after dying for several months. But I hope it will not do so in our own case.

May this be the final Ebola patient for we are tired of washing our hands with chlorinated water every now and then; we are fed up with the frequent and tormenting thermometer tests; our eardrums have sour by the hooting of the siren of the speeding Ebola ambulances. We no longer want to be frightened by the nightmarish apparel of members of the numerous burial teams. We are tired of the quarantine and the lock down.

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