Congo Ebola Deaths Top 2,500 as Outbreak Explodes
Congo Ebola Deaths Top 2,500 as Outbreak Explodes
The News
The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo is "growing exponentially" and has now killed more than 2,500 people, the United Nations' senior Ebola coordinator, Julien Harneis, said Friday.
Speaking by video call from Bunia in the country's northeast, Harneis said the epidemic now covers "an area that is bigger than France" and is "growing faster and wider than the Ebola response." He said half of the 2,500 deaths were reported in the last 20 days alone.
There have been more than 5,000 infections, according to Reuters and Deutsche Welle. It is the deadliest Ebola outbreak in Congo's history, and officials say it is the fastest-spreading on record — expanding roughly three times faster than the 2014-2016 West Africa outbreak that killed around 11,000 people.
The strain behind it, Bundibugyo, has no approved vaccine or treatment.
Timeline
Congolese authorities officially declare an Ebola outbreak after infections are detected in northeastern Ituri province, an area with poor health infrastructure where armed groups operate. Experts believe the virus had already been circulating unreported for months.
The virus spreads to five other provinces and into neighboring Uganda. Uganda contains its own outbreak and declares it over after 20 cases and two deaths.
The epidemic becomes the largest in Congo's history by case numbers, surpassing the 2018-2020 outbreak. It is the country's 17th Ebola epidemic.
WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus tells a media briefing the outbreak "had a big head start, it is still way ahead of us and we are playing catch-up." He says only $264 million of the $518 million needed for the direct health response has actually been disbursed.
Official figures put confirmed cases at 4,945, with 730 people in treatment centers, 1,040 recorded survivors and 2,325 deaths. That leaves 850 people who tested positive and are unaccounted for. The case-fatality rate stands at 47%.
Harneis says the death toll has passed 2,500 and warns that current funding reserves will run out within weeks.
Marks 100 days since the Bundibugyo strain was first reported.
Reactions
Harneis warned the outbreak will cross borders if the response is not scaled up fast. "If we do not ... then this epidemic will become more deadly. It will spread wider and it risks to spread into neighboring countries," he said.
He also described attacks on the people trying to stop it. "Healthcare workers and frontline workers have been attacked by youths, ambulances have been burned and stoned, and the healthcare facilities have been attacked," he said, adding: "Fear translates into angry young men who start throwing stones at their object of fear, the ambulance."
More than 260 incidents targeting health workers have been recorded over the past six months, leaving eight dead — "which is obviously terrifying because people are already risking their lives to deal with Ebola," Harneis said. Roughly 160 health workers have caught Ebola during the crisis, and 43 of them have died.
Dr. Jean Kaseya, director general of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a briefing in mid-August that the outbreak is on course to be "the largest one in the world."
Aid workers say conspiracy theories that the virus is a hoax have taken hold in hard-hit communities, and that rules barring families from burying their own dead have deepened resentment.
What's Next
The World Health Organization says it will immediately release 70,000 doses of Merck's Ervebo vaccine to Congo: 20,000 for a Phase 3 clinical trial to test its effect on Bundibugyo, and 50,000 for frontline and health workers. Ervebo is only approved against the more common Zaire strain, but the WHO says early animal-trial data suggests it may offer some protection against Bundibugyo.
Safety trials of two vaccines designed specifically for the Bundibugyo strain have also begun, along with trials of drugs used both as treatment and as preventive medicine for people exposed to a patient.
Authorities are switching tactics — going door to door to find people with symptoms and appointing responders in every village. Africa CDC estimates the current response is tracing about 12% of contacts; the target is 95%.
WHO officials hope the village-by-village approach reverses the spread within three months. They do not expect the outbreak to be over by the start of December.
More
Money is the choke point. Africa CDC says $518 million is needed for the direct health response and another $882 million for the surrounding humanitarian crisis. Donors including the United States, the European Union, African Union member states, the World Bank and its Pandemic Fund have pledged more than enough to cover it — but not all of the money has been released, and Tedros warned last week that getting ahead of the outbreak "depends on financing."
Getting cash to the front line is its own problem. The airport in Bunia has been closed to commercial flights for months, remote areas have no banks and no mobile money, and nurses and safe-burial teams have gone on strike over unpaid wages. As Prof. Yap Boum of Africa CDC put it: "If you don't have the cash in the city, and therefore in those villages, it's difficult to run some operations."
The next number to watch is the case-fatality rate, which has been rising and stood at 47% as of August 15. A fall would suggest patients are coming forward earlier and contact tracing is improving. The other is South Sudan, which borders Ituri and is already deep in a humanitarian crisis of its own; authorities there are training health workers in border towns to spot symptoms.
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