The Ouse to Ouse Tock (House to House Talk) was a three-day quarantine in

Sierra Leone Sierra Leone,)]. officially the Republic of Sierra Leone, is a country on the southwest coast of West Africa. It is bordered by Liberia to the southeast and Guinea surrounds the northern half of the nation. Covering a total area of , Sierra ...

from 19 September 2014 to 21 September 2014. It was part of an effort to combat the

Ebola virus epidemic in Sierra Leone An Ebola virus epidemic in Sierra Leone occurred in 2014, along with the neighbouring countries of Guinea and Liberia. On 18 March 2014, Guinean health officials announced the outbreak of a mysterious hemorrhagic fever "which strikes like lightni ...

, part of the

Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa The 2013–2016 epidemic of Ebola virus disease, centered in West Africa, Western Africa, was the most widespread List of Ebola outbreaks, outbreak of the disease in history. It caused major loss of life and Socioeconomics, socioeconomic disr ...

. One of the goals was to cut down on transmission within families, so individual homes were visited. There was concern that some families were harboring Ebola cases and that there was a lack of knowledge about the disease. The whole population had an imposed a three-day lockdown from 19 to 21 September 2014. During this period 28,500 trained community workers and volunteers, in 7,000 teams went door-to-door providing information on how to prevent infection, as well as setting up community Ebola surveillance teams. The campaign was called the ''Ouse to Ouse Tock'' in

Krio language Sierra Leonean Creole or Krio is an English-based creole language that is lingua franca and de facto national language spoken throughout the West African nation of Sierra Leone. Krio is spoken by 96 percent of the country's population, and it uni ...

, meaning the house-to-house talk. By this time in Sierra Leone alone over 400 people had died from Ebola. On 22 September the head of the Ebola Emergency Operations Centre, Stephen Gaojia, said that the three-day lockdown had met its objective and would not be extended. Eighty percent of targeted households were reached in the operation. Initially a total of around 150 new cases had been uncovered, although this was adjusted when the health ministry got reports from remote locations. One incident during the lockdown occurred when a burial team was attacked.

References

{{Use dmy dates, date=August 2019 2014 in Sierra Leone West African Ebola virus epidemic Health in Sierra Leone