Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

by Richard Preston

The Ebola war wasn’t won with modern medicine. It was a medieval war, and it went down as a brutal engagement between ordinary people and a life form that was trying to use the human body as a means of survival through deep time. In order to win this war against an inhuman enemy, people had to make themselves inhuman. They had to suppress their deepest feelings and instincts, tear down the bonds of love and feeling, isolate themselves from or isolate those they loved the most. Human beings had to become like monsters in order to save their human selves.

As the tide of the Makona strain receded, it left its dead scattered across eight countries, including Spain and the United States. Thirty thousand people had been infected. More than eleven thousand people had died of the virus, and untold thousands more had died because they couldn’t get medical care during the epidemic, since hospitals were devastated. Seven percent of all the doctors in Sierra Leone were dead. The medical infrastructure of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone had been wrecked. The three nations’ economies had functionally collapsed.