Sierra Leone will ban all public Christmas and New Year's celebrations in an effort to curtail further spread of Ebola, Agence France-Presse reports. The government's Ebola response unit told reporters on Friday that soldiers would be deployed to keep people in their homes.

Public gatherings had already been banned, The Guardian reports; these new restrictions are intended to keep people in Freetown, the nation's capital, where Ebola is rampant, from traveling to see family members elsewhere in the country where the disease may not have yet taken hold.

According to a World Health Organization (WHO) report released on Wednesday, Sierra Leone and its neighbors Guinea and Liberia account for all but 15 of a total of 6,388 Ebola-related deaths worlwide (out of a total of 17,942 cases). In the week before December 7, Sierra Leone confirmed 397 new cases—three times its neighbors' combined total—and in the last three weeks, AFP reports, Sierra Leone reported 1,319 new infections.

On Thursday, President Ernest Bai Koroma asked his citizens to stop practicing traditional remedies. "The illness started at the border, and now it is in the city, and close to two thousand people have died from the outbreak," he said, according to Sierra Leone newspaper Awoko. "The fight started with one laboratory, but today we have close to 10 labs in the country, and started with 50 bed capacity, but now we can have treatment and holding centres and we have improved on so many things."

Also on Thursday, government authorities initiated a two-week lockdown in the eastern district of Kono, The Guardian reports, where 87 people had been buried in 11 days. (This follows September's three-day, nationwide lockdown.) 25 people died in the five days before health workers arrived to investigate reports of the outbreak, a WHO report released Wednesday said.

Kono, a remote diamond-mining center with a population of 350,000, has only one hospital. The overwhelmed, under-resourced staff had not been trained to set up isolation zones. "They were actually carrying people who had died of Ebola to the morgue and passing the pregnancy ward, for example," Winnie Romeril, a WHO spokesperson who traveled with health workers to Kono, told NPR. "By the time we left there were already pregnant women dying."

[Image via AP Images]