A makeshift jungle hospital – tents, corrugated iron roofs and bright orange barriers – looks more like some kind of sinister detention centre. The people here are even more sinister-looking, in orange plastic suits, white boots, green gloves, headdresses, masks, ski goggles, and not an inch of actual person visible; they could be aliens. But these are the staff, the doctors. They’re like this because we’re in Sierra Leone and this is Unreported World: Surviving Ebola (Channel 4).

It looks like a nightmare. It is a nightmare – if anything, the title is misleadingly optimistic. The death ledger book is filling up. There have been 73 deaths in the past month alone. The body of the latest, a nine-year-old boy, still highly infectious, is carried to the morgue, a small bundle in a white plastic sheet. He will be buried round the back in a clearing that is rapidly running out of space.

Victims have been hiding at home and infecting their families. More patients arrive, six members of one family, staggering out of an ambulance, very sick and very scared. The ambulances double up as hearses.

Some people come in a van that is sprayed with chlorine after every journey. Like this mother and her daughter. But she, the mother is already dead. As her body is carried to the morgue, the seven-year-old child cries out: “I’m feeling cold, sir, I’m feeling cold.” A tiny utterance, but one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard. She dies later, too. The van is sprayed.

And as if that wasn’t hell enough, there’s a rumour in the nearby town that Ebola is just a hoax, devised by doctors so that they can steal blood from people. They’re rioting. Civil unrest to add to the terror, vomit, blood, diarrhoea and death, while Médecins Sans Frontières doctors fight a battle it appears they cannot win.

Shaunagh Connaire and Wael Dabbous’s short film is a chilling and bleak one. It is also brave – there must have been some risk involved. And it is important. Of course you knew the Ebola story, but perhaps, like for me, it was just that – a news story, distant, and a name. This was a rude, visceral wake-up to the terrible reality.