At another six households on the cemetery supervisor’s list of the dead, residents gave similar accounts. One family said the victim had definitely died of Ebola, while five others described Ebola-like symptoms — vomiting, diarrhea, fever — though none had been given an official cause of death.

International health experts here had no explanation for the striking discrepancy between the government’s tally of the dead in the capital and the cemetery crew’s statistics. Several of them noted the general confusion surrounding official statistics here from the beginning, with one leading international health official saying: “We don’t know exactly what is going on.”

But nobody disputed that things appear to be getting worse. The W.H.O. has shown a sharp increase in new cases in Freetown in recent weeks, rising from almost none early in the summer to more than 50 during the week of Sept. 14.

Various models of the growth of the epidemic here “all show an exponential increase,” said Peter H. Kilmarx, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team in Sierra Leone. “The conditions are amenable to Ebola spread.”

The goal of the government’s national lockdown was to reach every household in the country, and officials claimed success in doing so on Monday, saying that progress had been made in the fight against the disease.