After 23 days in quarantine — far longer than required — Jimmy Spire Ssentongo in Uganda walked free, in part, because of his cartoon. It showed a bound prisoner begging for liberation after several negative tests, while a health minister demanded to know where he was hiding the virus.

"The impression was that we were a dangerous group and that what was necessary was to protect the rest of society from us," said Ssentongo, a cartoonist for Uganda's Observer newspaper who was put in quarantine when he returned from Britain in March.