And in the streets of Guinea's capital, it is rare to see the formerly ubiquitous plastic buckets of bleach and water for hand washing.
Ten months after it dawned on health officials that they were facing an unprecedented Ebola outbreak in west Africa, experts and officials agree the tide is turning, although previous lulls have proved short-lived. There is still no vaccine or licensed treatment, nor is it clear whether the international community has actually learned any lessons from an epidemic that killed at least 8,675 people.
"Things have changed drastically for the better — no one can deny that," said Aitor Sanchez Lacomba, Liberia country director for the International Rescue Committee. "How can we make sure that we don't have these kinds of situations in the future?"
Previous disease outbreaks, including SARS and bird flu, prompted calls to build strong health surveillance systems and to reinforce agencies like the World Health Organization. But little has changed.
"Recriminations are counterproductive, but it will be necessary to understand whether this outbreak could have been responded to quicker with less cost and less suffering," Dr. David Nabarro, UN Ebola chief, told the UN General Assembly this week.
Julius Kamara, a father to two girls who remain home instead of going to school in Freetown, Sierra Leone, said there are fewer checkpoints, restrictions on movements are being lifted but gatherings are banned and bars and clubs are closed.
"We are all looking forward to when life can get back to normal," he said.
Sierra Leone plans to reopen schools in March, following Guinea, which opened this week. Liberia is set to reopen schools on Feb. 2.
"The epidemic has turned," Ismael Ould Cheikh Ahmed, the new head of the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response known as UNMEER, recently declared. The number of cases in Guinea and Sierra Leone is at its lowest since August, and in Liberia it's the lowest since June.
Still, he and other officials caution that they lack crucial information about the remaining cases. Only about half of new cases in Guinea and Liberia are from known contacts; the remainder is getting infected from unknown sources.
No such statistics exist for Sierra Leone, where deaths are still being underreported because families want to carry out burials in accordance with tradition, which involves touching bodies — one of the quickest ways to spread Ebola.
"There are still numbers of new cases that are alarming, and there are hot spots that are emerging in new places that make me believe there is still quite a lot of the disease that we're not seeing," said Nabarro, the UN Ebola chief.
At its height, one estimate warned that as many as 1.4 million people could become infected with Ebola by mid-January if there were no additional interventions. Instead, the confirmed case toll is 21,797 with 8,675 deaths.
However, nearly every agency and government stumbled in its response to Ebola. In an internal draft document obtained by the Associated Press last year, WHO acknowledged there was "a failure to see that conditions for explosive spread were present right at the start."
The document said the agency was hampered by budget cuts and the need to battle other diseases flaring around the world.
"The world today doesn't have a proper organization to respond quickly to this kind of catastrophe," said Brice de le Vingne, director of operations for Doctors Without Borders.
On Sunday, WHO's executive board plans to discuss several proposals that could redefine how the UN health agency responds to outbreaks. In a recent report, WHO wondered whether the commitment to battling the dreaded disease will remain strong.
"The virus has demonstrated its tenacity time and time again," the report said. "Will national and international control efforts show an equally tenacious staying power?"
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