WATERLOO, Sierra Leone — At first, the chief said nobody was sick in his community. Then he said that if anybody was sick it was because of witchcraft. Then he acknowledged that health workers were removing several suspected Ebola patients every day. In fact 15 corpses had been taken in less than a week from the community, but the chief did not admit that.

Persistent denial has been harmful to the fight against the virus. It stretches from the village to the state house, and it echoes into the circles of some of the international agencies now thick on the ground in Sierra Leone and the other Ebola-afflicted nations in West Africa.

That tendency to minimize the damage being caused by the disease — the hardship and death it is inflicting — has been perceptible since the outbreak was first discovered in March. But the denial’s effect is to prolong the suffering.

There is a disconnect between what is happening on the ground, inside houses, hospital wards and the grim holding centers where children, women and men are painfully dying of Ebola, and much of the official response.