At first it seemed she was right. ELWA3 opened originally with 120 beds, then quickly expanded to 250. In September it seemed that even that wasn't enough. Staff members had to turn away suspected Ebola patients at the gate.
So to hear that the hospital's patient roster had dropped to just eight last week is great news.
A spokeswoman for Doctors Without Borders says the admissions fluctuate a lot, and the tally has since gone up from eight to 17. But still 17 Ebola patients is a far cry from 250.
Part of why that statistic of eight screams so loudly is that ELWA3 is now a sign of how dramatically the number of cases has come down in Liberia.
There's no denying that it was worth building the 250-bed hospital. It got all of those people out of circulation, so they couldn't spread the virus to others.
But now the international response once again seems out of step with epidemic. On the same day that ELWA3 had more than 200 empty beds last week, the Chinese government opened a brand new 100 bed Ebola treatment unit just down the street.
ebola
Liberia