As Ebola rises to the forefront of global awareness every day, VICE News’ “Fighting Ebola” traces the December 2013 outbreak in Guinea. It quickly spread to Liberia, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and by the time the film was made, Liberia had become the focus of a rapidly full-blown epidemic in March 2014. More than 3,000 infections have been registered there so far, about half of which have been fatal.
VICE reporter Danny Gold takes us to Monrovia, Liberia’s capital, to document what citizens are being forced to do after the virus invades. Redemption Hospital is the center of Ebola treatment in the city, and we are the first to learn about the various efforts of medical staff to control and treat the outbreak. The facility was overwhelmed and unable to handle the growing influx of new patients, who arrived in trucks virtually every day.
A fearless ambulance driver has revealed in an interview that when he spoke to filmmakers, he had eight infected townspeople in his car who would be forced to stay there until the hospital has room for them . Another interview outside the facility highlighted an infected man who lay in the toilet for hours because there were no beds inside. Not only is this dire for the patients themselves, but after being denied admission, they are often forced back into the community, where they become conduits for the spread of the virus.
The focus then shifted to the nearby ghetto of West Point, where the virus is also present. Under the harsh conditions here, although at the time of filming the outbreak was not yet more widespread than elsewhere, the risk of the virus taking hold was still much higher simply because of the concentration of the population and the lack of resources to effectively control the risk.
The remainder of the film follows the crew as they join body recovery teams, claim those who have died from the virus, and explore various camps and makeshift emergency treatment facilities.
