For days, the dusty roads of a small town in Mongolia's westernmost province were largely deserted.
“After the quarantine [was announced], not many people — even locals — were in the streets for fear of catching the disease,” Sebastian Pique, an American Peace Corps volunteer who has lived in the remote mountainous region for two years, told the Agence France-Presse.
The illness that sparked widespread alarm among the town's roughly 1,400 residents and visitors, and left them isolated for six days?
The town of Tsagaannuur, located near the border between Mongolia and Russia, was recently sealed off following the deaths of a local couple who contracted the plague from eating the raw meat and organs of an infected marmot, Ariuntuya Ochirpurev with the World Health Organization in Ulaanbaatar, told The Washington Post.