The authorities of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) reported this Wednesday that the Ebola outbreak declared in mid-May has already crossed the thresholds of 10,100 cases and 4,900 deaths, in a context of virus expansion that could turn this episode into the deadliest recorded worldwide so far.
The National Institute of Public Health (INSP) has detailed that to date 10,141 infections and 4,928 deaths have been counted, with 81 new infections and 42 deaths in the last 24 hours, which places the global fatality rate at 48.6%.
The agency has also specified that there are currently 999 patients hospitalized or in isolation centers, while another 2,708 people have been discharged after overcoming the disease. The follow-up of contacts of confirmed cases reaches 84.5%, a percentage that has been increasing in recent days.
So far, eight provinces have been affected: North Kivu, South Kivu, Upper Uélé, Lower Uélé, Tshopo, North Ubangi, South Ubangi and Ituri. The latter remains the epicenter of the outbreak, concentrating 71.5% of the total infections, although it only represents 44.4% of the cases detected during the last day.
In this scenario, the non-governmental organization Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) has warned that the fact that the number of positive Ebola cases has surpassed the 10,000 mark highlights the urgency of strengthening the response to the outbreak, caused by the Bundibugyo strain, for which there is no approved vaccine or treatment.
"The 10,000 confirmed cases should serve as a wake-up call: this response is not managing to stay ahead of the outbreak nor is it providing communities with what they need to control transmission," said the head of the NGO's emergency team, Silvia Beccaecece. "The warning signs are there for all to see; now, it all depends on whether leaders pay attention and take the necessary measures," she argued.
"As I travel through Ituri, I see how harshly the disease is affecting communities, and I am struck by how much more remains to be done to bring this outbreak under control," she stated, before recalling that residents in this area of DRC "have spent years suffering the consequences of extreme violence, forced displacement and the lack of basic services".
In this line, he has underlined that to this situation is now added Ebola, "at a time when many have already exhausted their capacity to cope with the additional challenge it poses". "The truth is that the current response is not, by any means, proportional to the enormous magnitude of the outbreak" he lamented, according to a statement released by the NRC.
The outbreak in DRC is already the deadliest in the country's history, ahead of the one recorded between 2018 and 2020, and projections indicate that it could even surpass that of West Africa between 2014 and 2016, which caused 28,616 cases and 11,325 deaths in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, according to data from the World Health Organization (WHO).
In recent weeks, infections have also been detected in Kenya and Nigeria linked to the DRC outbreak —after Uganda announced on July 28 that it was free of the virus after two deaths and 20 cases—, which has led several neighboring countries to intensify surveillance in order to curb the spread of the disease.