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.
