In December 2013 an Ebola outbreak begins in Guinea and spreads within months to Liberia, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. By March 2014 Liberia has become the epicenter, with more than 3,000 recorded infections and a fatality rate near fifty percent. VICE reporter Danny Gold travels to Monrovia as President Obama announces plans to send American military personnel to the region, and the footage he brings back shows Redemption Hospital overwhelmed, with patients arriving by the van-load and no beds to receive them. An ambulance driver interviewed on camera has eight infected people waiting behind him with nowhere to take them; outside the hospital, a man lies in a latrine for hours because the facility is full. Gold moves on to West Point, a densely packed slum where crowding and scarce resources make containment nearly impossible, and follows a body retrieval team collecting the dead. The film stays close to the people doing the work, not the statistics.