The U.S. military has arrived in Liberia to help manage the Ebola pandemic in West Africa. This effort is unfortunately too little and too late and will not reverse the original governance errors of isolating rural villages, alienating hospital workers, abandoning the sick, quarantining slums and understating the scale of infections. In fact, it is quite unclear whether the World Health Organization’s worst-case projection of 1.4 million cases of Ebola by January 2015 can be prevented.

While the tragedy in Dallas of a single Liberian traveler falling ill from Ebola after days of exposing others serves to alarm the American public of the threat, the incident has done little so far to hasten an adequate global response.

To this day, the threat continues to grow not only because Ebola is striking at the large impoverished urban populations of Conakry, Guinea; Freetown, Sierra Leone; and Monrovia, Liberia, but also because the disease continues to pick off the critical health workers who are necessary to combat the virus’ spread.

In the latest setback, Liberia’s chief medical officer, Bernice Dahn, has decided to quarantine herself after her assistant died of Ebola. Dahn says she is showing no Ebola symptoms of fever and weakness, but she will know for sure only after the virus’ incubation period of 21 days has passed.

Meanwhile, international assistance for the overwhelmed and now dysfunctional governments of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea is arriving in a tardy, slight, hesitant fashion, despite the clear judgment of medical experts that the epidemic is out of control.

In addition to the military contingent the U.S. sent, Britain, China and Cuba are dispatching various small teams of medical workers. There is also a lone air shipment, sent by the NGO Direct Relief, of supplies needed to protect health workers and aid the sick, such as surgical clothing, plastic sheets, chlorine disinfectant and medications.

None of these efforts will answer the enormous scale of the crisis or resolve the problems that exacerbated it. The remedies applied so far of isolating, intimidating and propagandizing the at-risk populations are being repeated by the same authorities who watched the outbreak explode since spring.

1. Isolation did not work. For example, the three member states of the West African Mona River Association — Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia — ruled on Aug. 1 to impose a cordon sanitaire on the countryside of Sierra Leone. It quickly failed because the unprepared, uneducated armed soldiers maintaining the checkpoints were not given the means to choose between the ill and the well. They blocked everyone who was not in a vehicle with government approval to pass, such as journalists. In addition, villages where Ebola already struck were largely abandoned, despite children and farms to care for. Where did the villagers go? Likely to the homes of relatives in uninfected villages or to population centers such as the capital, Freetown.

In this fashion, with small villages emptying to larger ones and those in turn to Freetown to stay ahead of the illness, Ebola traveled to the slums of Freetown. This pattern was likely repeated in Liberia and Guinea.

In Monrovia the health centers quickly collapsed. When I spoke with Al Jazeera America’s Clair MacDougall in mid-August, health workers in Monrovia were refusing to go to work until the government guaranteed their families would be cared for in the event of their deaths. As of mid-September, Monrovia’s hospitals remained dysfunctional, without workers, supplies and plans to reopen.

2. Intimidation did not work. In August, the Liberian government ordered a quarantine of the vast West Point slum along the sandy coast of Monrovia. There was soon a shooting incident, when the unprepared armed forces were faced with a panicky population. The government of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf soon reversed itself under international pressure, but public confidence in Monrovia’s leadership was finished.

The quarantine centers to which the sick were referred for help proved to worsen the crisis. Photographs from Liberia taken in mid-August showed centers were without equipment or workers; they were functionally no better than places to die. Those centers that were functional were overrun with the sick.