But the government-ordered isolation of victims and careful monitoring of those in their immediate orbit was not happening in the impoverished Kissi neighborhood of this dense seaside capital. At the unpainted cinder-block bungalow of Saudatu Koroma’s family, who are not related to the president, five members were supposed to be under government quarantine. But there were at least eight people Sunday afternoon on the tiny veranda overlooking a muddy slope leading to Cline Bay.

“The neighbors were there. That’s the concern. They are not isolated,” said a nutritionist from the government health ministry who had come to deliver the family’s meals — placing food, disposable plates and plastic utensils on the veranda. She declined to give her name, saying she was not authorized to speak publicly.

“The family, the neighbors, they come to sympathize,” she added. “They don’t understand.”

At least three other houses in Freetown are supposed to be under quarantine, the official said. So far, the capital has largely been spared — Saudatu Koroma, 32, was one of a relative handful of people to die of Ebola in the city — but the disease rages in Sierra Leone’s east. In all, at least 234 deaths have been confirmed in the nation, the second-highest total after far more populous Guinea, where the epidemic started.

Sierra Leone now has more cases of the virus than any other country in the region, 646 out of a total of 1,603, according to the W.H.O.’s latest count. In the city of Kenema, where the government has tried to set up a treatment center, 15 to 20 health care workers, including the country’s lead doctor, have died. The remaining poorly paid nurses went on strike over the government’s initial lax response.

But the problem is not just with the government effort. In some quarters, the very existence of Ebola continues to be challenged by the population that the virus is afflicting. Just up the street from the Koroma household, a government warning poster on Ebola had been mostly ripped from the wall. A few blocks away, a health ministry truck equipped with loudspeakers and plastered with graphic images of Ebola’s symptoms warned residents of the dangers. Nobody on the bustling street on Sunday paid any attention.

Several bystanders said they were unaware that a Ebola victim had lived down the street. A young neighborhood man, seeing Western visitors in a car, reached in through the window, slammed his fist down on one of them, and yelled “Ebola not there!”