Liberia is among the hardest hit by the Ebola epidemic that currently sweeps through West Africa and given the high number of fatalities caused by the virus, sick people in this country can be easily mistaken as dead.
Making matters worse is that burial workers appear to be more active at gathering the dead than health service providers taking care of and treating those who were infected. The grim situation in Ebola-struck Liberia is highlighted in an incident that ABC's Richard Besser witnessed while he was in the nation's capital of Monrovia.
Besser, who was reporting for ABC's "Good Morning America" from Monrovia in Liberia, was describing how a burial team was preparing the body of a 37-year old man lying on the side of a street. The man had been sick for days and believed to be dead.
Besser's team captured video of the burial crew spraying the area around the man with bleach and wrapping him up apparently to bring him to the crematorium when Besser and the responders realized that the supposedly dead Ebola victim is still alive when he moved his arm.
The crowd cheered to see the man alive. After about ten minutes, an ambulance arrived and took the sick man to the hospital. Besser observed that while the man was alive, he looked like he could only live for a few more hours.
A community leader said that they had asked for medical attention several times before the man became seriously ill but the medical help did not arrive. Interestingly, it only took about an hour for the burial team to arrive once the man was reported dead revealing what appears to be the helpless situation of people struck by the Ebola virus in Liberia.
The country experiences a shortage in hospital beds and spaces as it battles with Ebola. The most recent count showed that Liberia has nearly 3,700 Ebola cases and 1,998 Ebola-related deaths.
"The problem that they have here is that there is a lot more room for dead bodies than there are people who need treatment," Besser said. "So when they thought he had died, it was easier to come and collect him. Now, the ambulance is here, they have to find a bed."
Although there are experimental vaccines for the disease, no treatment or vaccine is yet available to cure and provide protection against Ebola and this exacerbate the situation in affected countries.
