BuzzFeed’s reporter on the ground in Liberia has an excellent story on what health officials in that country are saying — and it seems to be mostly good news. As the number of treatment beds in the country has expanded substantially, the number of dead bodies and patients in treatment has dropped in real terms. Or so aid agencies and the Liberian authorities think. While they’re going to a great deal of effort to count cases in Liberia (and I assume the same is happening in Sierra Leone and Guinea), there’s really no accurate count of how many cases there are and how many have died of the disease.

Better yet, BuzzFeed is told that the situation seems to be improving both in the capitol, Monrovia, and in a couple remote areas of the country, including one county that borders both Sierra Leone and Guinea. This suggests that, even without accurate statistics on the Ebola situation, there’s reason to think the epidemic could be losing steam across the country. (It’s also possible that people’s general impressions of the pace of infection are just wrong, and the situation isn’t getting better at all, but there are some statistics to support this.)

It can’t happen too soon, of course, as residents get more and more upset about the restrictions placed on those who’ve had contact with the disease, and as Liberia’s health system has to turn away people with most other ailments in order to focus on Ebola.

How much this suggested improvement has to do with resources and manpower that the U.S. and Europe have provided to Liberia and the region is unclear. Earlier this week, the head of the West African regional body, ECOWAS, said that resources, from governments and private aid groups (such as Doctors without Borders) are getting there. That help is key to defeating the epidemic: The world wasn’t going to be able to buy and build a functional health system in three of the world’s most dysfunctional countries in any reasonable period of time, and the World Health Organization is a bureaucracy, not a health agency. (E.g., it can help advise and run Liberia’s or Sierra Leone’s health systems, but it can’t staff them itself.)

One thing we do know: There’s already a significant amount of U.S. resources and manpower on the ground in Liberia, where the U.S. has the strongest ties. Sierra Leone, as a Commonwealth country, has never done much business with the U.S. aid bureaucracy; Guinea gets aid from France, its former colonizer, but generally has not gotten along well with the West. The differences across countries explain why Liberia, probably the least functional of the three countries, might be the first to report some success in beating back the disease, but it’ll be a long time until we really know.