And it’s not good news.
This from Dr Craig Spencer:
And he should know:
To be fair, this assumption means that I should be a bit of an authority on a lot of illnesses. And – because people do ask, my Top 3 worst ones from a personal experience point of view would be: Covid at number one, with Malaria and Influenza rather close behind. I’m guessing that if I managed to get it, Ebola might top the list quickly and (in all probability) finally.
Anyway…
The combined confirmed and suspected Ebola cases in DRC are now more than 1,000.
All signs are pointing to a very long and catastrophic outbreak in Central Africa:
- This is a vast undercount. We know this because the test positivity rate is hovering around 50%, only 20% of contacts are being traced (and in some areas, no contacts at all), and more cases keep popping up with no known connection. This all points to widespread and undetected community transmission.
- This is in only a week of detection. Compared to previous outbreaks, the growth is very fast, as the huge West Africa outbreak in 2016 was first detected at 49 cases and rose to 208 cases a month later. It took four months for that outbreak to reach the size of the current one in the DR Congo.
- The cases are spread out across 16 health zones. There are now multiple epicenters, making containment very difficult.
Next door in Uganda, the case count is seven. While this number is low compared to DRC, a concerning development is that two health care workers recently tested positive with uncertain exposure histories. If they weren’t treating known Ebola cases, this means it’s spreading undetected in Uganda as well.
As ever with outbreaks in less developed areas of the world, we’ll likely never know the true scale of this outbreak. And we definitely won’t have an accurate handle on what is going on day-to-day. That makes it very difficult to direct whatever resources might be available in order to help those on the ground. And all of this has been compounded by the withdrawal of USAID in the region. We can’t say for definite that this caused the outbreak to occur, but it’s fairly well accepted by those in the know that it will be playing a big part in not being able to control it more quickly and efficiently.
The US plan to bury their heads in the sand, and direct anyone from the affected region to a (as yet unbuilt) field hospital in Kenya is a worrying and bizarre decision (at least when compared with previous presidencies).
But whatever the causes and whatever the complications, it’s clear that this outbreak is – at the present time, at least – completely out of control.