On Saturday, the World Health Organization declared Liberia to be free of Ebola, with no new cases in the last 42 days, twice the virus’s maximum incubation period.

“We will celebrate our communities which have taken responsibility and participated in fighting this unknown enemy and finally we’ve crossed the Rubicon,” President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf told the BBC. “Liberia indeed is a happy nation.”

According to The Guardian, the disease has claimed the lives of more than 4,700 Liberians since breaking out in March of last year. From WHO:

Interruption of transmission is a monumental achievement for a country that reported the highest number of deaths in the largest, longest, and most complex outbreak since Ebola first emerged in 1976. At the peak of transmission, which occurred during August and September 2014, the country was reporting from 300 to 400 new cases every week.

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Though the capital city was hardest hit, every one of Liberia’s 15 counties eventually reported cases. At one point, virtually no treatment beds for Ebola patients were available anywhere in the country. With infectious cases and corpses remaining in homes and communities, almost guaranteeing further infections, some expressed concern that the virus might become endemic in Liberia, adding another – and especially severe – permanent threat to health.

“I’m particularly struck by the significant progress we have made as a country and as a people,” Liberia’s Assistant Minister of Health, Tolbert Nyenswah, said on Thursday. “The only caution is that our subregion is not free yet.”

Last week, 18 cases of Ebola were diagnosed in neighboring Ghana and Sierra Leone, 2015’s lowest weekly total, The New York Times reports.

[Image via AP Images]