‘We clap if none die’: Covid forces hard choices in Sierra Leone

With medical resources diverted to the pandemic, years of progress in children's healthcare are under threat

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Nurse Magdalene Fornah was on duty at Freetown's Connaught hospital when she heard that Sierra Leone had its first confirmed coronavirus case. It was five years after Ebola had killed about 4,000 people in the small country, ravaging the fragile health system. Soon after that initial case was announced last March, the UN estimated that 3.3 million people across Africa could die of Covid-19.

Like the rest of her medical colleagues, Fornah had no idea this nightmare scenario would not come to pass. When I saw the first patients, I was scared," she says.