BRAZZAVILLE – The ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has quickly grown into the second-largest on record, with cases taking just weeks to reach levels that had taken years in previous outbreaks.
There have been at least 3,553 confirmed cases since this outbreak was identified in mid-May, according to data published Friday by the World Health Organization. At least 1,558 people have died.
In just over two months, cases in this outbreak have surpassed the total number reported in another historic Ebola outbreak in the DRC that lasted nearly two years, from August 2018 to June 2020.
The first 1,000 cases in this outbreak were reported within the first 40 days of response activation, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but it took nearly six times as long — about 235 days — to reach more than 1,000 cases during the 2018 outbreak.
Now, the only larger Ebola outbreak is the 2014-16 outbreak in West Africa, which ended with more than 28,600 reported cases and 11,325 deaths. The current outbreak presents a challenging set of circumstances: it is driven by the rare Bundibugyo strain of the virus, for which vaccines and treatments are not readily available, and active conflict in the region is hindering the ability of response teams to reach affected communities.
Despite the progress we have made, the outbreak in DRC is continuing to outpace the response,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said this month. “Intense transmission in the province of Ituri remains our biggest concern.”
About two-thirds of the deaths are happening among people who never received care in a health facility, which can drive community transmission due to exposures that may occur with unsafe handling of bodies.
Each confirmed case in an urban area is believed to have 40 potential contacts; with about 3,400 cases in the DRC, the contact tracing list should have about 135,000 people for outbreak response teams to follow up with.
But only about 1 in 8 — fewer than 18,000 people — have been identified for that list, Dr. Jean Kaseya, director general of the Africa CDC, said at a briefing Thursday. More than 80% of new cases are detected in people who had not been identified through contact tracing.
“If we don’t master this indicator, we’ll not stop this outbreak,” Kaseya said.
“I’m not in a position to tell you that we have total control of this outbreak today, because for me to say that, for me to confirm that we achieved the peak and we can start to think about when, maybe, we can stop this outbreak, we need to ensure that all new cases are coming from the contact list. We need to ensure that all deaths are coming from confirmed cases that we have isolated or admitted,” he said. “This is not the case.”
