Inside an Ebola Ward, and a Roadblock for Trump’s $1.8 Billion Fund
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From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Monday, June 1st. Here's what we're covering.
When I walked into the Ebola ward in Mangualu General Hospital, the first thing that struck me was how many people were walking around without any form of protection. A handful of people were wearing rubber gloves. Some of them had pulled a scarf or part of their sweater across their mouths. But for the most part, people were wearing nothing. And that meant that they were at great risk of catching the virus that causes Ebola themselves.
Declan Walsh is The Times' chief Africa correspondent. He's been on the ground in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the Ebola outbreak has now ballooned to the third largest on record and where hospitals are struggling to keep up.
The other thing was just how tightly packed the patients were. In that small ward that we visited, we found a five-year-old boy who had just come in the night before with incessant bleeding from his nose. He was lying on the bed with a tissue stuffed into his nose to staunch the bleeding with his dad watching over him. But just two beds away from that boy lay the body of a 21-year-old woman who had died yesterday. during the night and her remains had still not been removed. Now, the bodies of people who have just died from Ebola are incredibly infectious, yet it was just covered by a thin sheet that had been pulled over. That only added to that sense of danger inside that treatment facility. And in fact, people were being infected at the hospital because when we went into the next ward, we found the lab technician from the hospital who himself had gotten infected
apparently infected with Ebola as part of his job taking samples from other people. And we later learned that seven other staff members from that hospital had already died from the virus. That was just a sign of how bad conditions were in that hospital. And I was brought around the ward by a young Congolese doctor. He told me he was angry. He was angry at his own government, which had taken so long to detect this outbreak. It appears there was at least six weeks between the outbreak starting and the first case being tested and detected. But he was also more broadly angry angry at the international response system towards Ebola, he turned around to me at one point and he said, here we are in Mangualu, in the town where the epidemic started, where there are the highest number of cases, and yet this is the best we can do.
Now, it's important to say that there is aid coming into this area. In the capital, Bunja, where I'm currently speaking from, there is an airport where planes are coming in, bringing supplies, much-needed supplies. There are other treatment centers being set up as well. But the challenge is, because data is so sparse, we don't really know the extent of this outbreak, how deep or how far it has spread inside the population. We don't really know if these facilities are going to be enough because the aid effort is so far behind the curve, it's not even keeping pace with this outbreak as of now.
A federal judge has blocked the government from launching President Trump's controversial $1.8 billion fund. The pot of money is intended to pay people the administration claims were harmed by the government. But as soon as it was announced, critics blasted it as a slush fund for Trump's allies and warned that it could be used to give payouts to January 6th rioters, among others. The judge said that for now, no money can be dispersed, at least until she holds a hearing later this month about one of several lawsuits challenging the fund.
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