Adam Nossiter of the
New York Times reports,
The Other Ebola Toll: African Economies. The World Health Organization recently predicted the death toll from Ebola could reach over 20,000 in the next 6 to 9 months, but the economic costs and side-effects are going to be more difficult to calculate, although it is already clear that "food insecurity" is a significant and escalating risk as quarantines have cute off vast regions in rural areas of the Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone.
DAKAR, Senegal — Airlines have canceled their flights to the countries most affected. Prices of staple goods are going up, and food supplies are dwindling. Border posts are being closed, foreign workers are going home and national growth rates are projected to plummet.
Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea are already three of the poor nations in the world, and their prospects are going from bad to worse as a secondary toll of the "out-of-control" Ebola epidemic exacts another toll - economic devastation.
Even though the World Health Organization has declared it medically unnecessary, an increasing number of flight cancellations, border closing, impromptu cordons, and other quarantine measures are leaving many areas without cut of from trade, and food supplies.
But many African nations have gone ahead anyway, sealing borders, barring entry to residents of the affected countries, stopping their national carriers from flying there, and even, in the case of Senegal, refusing to allow humanitarian flights with urgently needed supplies and medical personnel. That decision has infuriated aid agencies here in their West African hub. South Africa and Kenya, two of the continent’s economic heavyweights, have restricted entry to people coming from the Ebola zone.
Liberia was already reeling from a recent civil war.
“With the main harvest now at risk and trade and movements of goods severely restricted, food insecurity is poised to intensify in the weeks and months to come,” the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s regional representative for Africa, Bukar Tijani, said in a statement Tuesday.
Nossiter quotes the finance minister of Sierra Leone is predicting the loss of a planting season and a "one-third drop in agricultural output." Normally busy trade roads are empty has soldiers and police deny passage out of vast regions behind cordons.
Hotels and restaurants in Freetown reports occupancy rates dropping 40%.
In more optimistic news Rick Gladstone, of the New York Times, tells us the Ebola Vaccine Could Be Ready by November, W.H.O. Says.
Two vaccines against the deadly Ebola virus that is ravaging West Africa could be available as soon as November, the World Health Organization announced on Friday. It said the vaccines would be given first to health care workers at the greatest risk of exposure to the disease. ...
The announcements were made at the end of an extraordinary two-day meeting of nearly 200 experts at the organization’s Geneva headquarters. The meeting was called to expedite treatments for Ebola, which has killed nearly 2,100 people over the past six months. Nearly all of the deaths have been in three West African countries — Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone — but clusters of cases have also appeared recently in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. ...
Officials have said that $600 million in supplies will be required to fight the Ebola outbreak, the worst since the disease was first identified in 1976, and that as many as 20,000 people could be infected before it is brought under control.
Our best wishes and/or prayers go out to all of those afflicted, their loved ones, and all the people of Western Africa struggling against this terrible Ebola virus, other tropical diseases and their economic and social side-effects.