The Congo Ebola Outbreak was still spreading one month after it was declared, with confirmed cases climbing to more than 800 between Monday and Tuesday. Health officials said the count had risen by about 300 since last week, a jump that shows the outbreak has not been contained in the Democratic Republic of Congo or in neighboring Uganda.
The surge matters now because the World Health Organization warned that the virus was still widening its geographic reach in Congo, where intense community transmission continues in the Central African region. In Uganda, officials said no new Ebola cases had been reported in 11 days, but the border worries remain because all of the country’s confirmed cases were imported from Congo. As of June 10, the WHO said Uganda had at least 19 confirmed cases and two deaths.
WHO Incident Manager Marie-Roseline Belizaire said deaths were still being reported by the community in Congo and that “that means we are missing cases.” She also said, “One month after the outbreak has been declared, I’m still feeling concerned.” Her warning lands with weight because Congolese health workers had managed to follow up with only a little over half of the people who came into contact with confirmed cases, leaving about 3,000 possible contacts still unaccounted for.
That gap has already shown up on the ground. In Ituri province, security forces fired warning shots to break up an angry crowd trying to take the body of an Ebola victim home while health workers tried to remove it for the community’s safety. Even in death, Ebola victims are highly contagious, and resistance to safe burial practices makes tracing the outbreak harder just as the case count keeps rising.
The harder question now is not whether the outbreak has crossed borders, but how many chains of infection are still hidden inside Congo’s communities. With the virus still expanding and thousands of contacts not yet traced, authorities are left trying to close gaps that may already be larger than their best count.
