Ebola deaths pass 5,000 in DR Congo in the country’s deadliest outbreak on record
Health ministry data released on Saturday showed 5,026 people have died among 10,351 cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ebola outbreak, making it the country’s deadliest ever and the second-deadliest in history, with health officials warning containment is still falling behind the spread.
More than 5,000 people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ebola outbreak, according to health ministry data released on Saturday, marking a grim milestone in what is now the country’s deadliest Ebola epidemic on record and the second-deadliest ever recorded anywhere in the world.
The ministry figures, reported by the Associated Press, the BBC, TRT World and Daily Sabah, showed 5,026 deaths among 10,351 confirmed and suspected cases, a case fatality rate of 48.6 per cent — meaning nearly one in every two people known to have been infected has died. A total of 2,788 people have recovered so far.
The outbreak was declared in mid-May, after the Bundibugyo species of the virus was identified, and it caught health authorities by surprise. Unlike the better-known Zaire species, the Bundibugyo virus has no approved vaccine and no specific treatment, so doctors can only treat patients’ symptoms while their bodies fight the infection — a limitation that has shaped the response from the start.
By August the epidemic had already become the deadliest in the country’s history, passing the 2018–2020 outbreak in the east of the country, which killed 2,299 people. It is the seventeenth Ebola outbreak recorded in DR Congo, but its scale now puts it behind only the 2014–2016 epidemic in West Africa, which killed around 11,000 people across several countries over two years.
The disease has spread to 67 of the country’s 178 health zones, across eight of its 26 provinces: Haut-Uele, Ituri, North Kivu, South Kivu, Bas-Uele, Tshopo, South Ubangi and North Ubangi. The epicentre remains the conflict-affected east, where Ituri and North Kivu provinces together account for 9,782 confirmed cases and 4,792 deaths.
The human cost behind the numbers was underlined by Dr Patrick Otim, a programme area manager with the World Health Organization, who told the Associated Press: “It is a very tragic milestone because it is not just a number.” His warning was echoed by the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), whose director-general, Jean Kaseya, told African health ministers that the continent is “not winning so far” against the outbreak.
The Africa CDC’s concern rests on two troubling patterns. About 80 per cent of new cases are now coming from outside the chains of contacts that health teams are monitoring, meaning most new infections are appearing through transmission routes the authorities have not traced. And about one in three people who died never reached a treatment centre at all, dying before they could be tested or treated — a sign of how far the virus has outrun the response in remote and insecure areas.
Frontline health workers are paying a heavy price. The Africa CDC on Friday called for stronger measures to protect them after two young Congolese doctors died from Ebola earlier in the week, one in North Kivu and one in Ituri. Health workers face the virus at close quarters, often with limited protective equipment and in areas where armed conflict makes even reaching patients dangerous, and their deaths further thin the ranks of the people most needed to stop the spread.
Cases have also been recorded in other African countries, raising fears of wider regional spread, and the World Health Organization’s own tally as of 26 October — 10,172 confirmed cases and 4,932 deaths across five countries including Uganda, France, Kenya and Nigeria — already stood close to Saturday’s Congolese ministry figures, underlining how fast the toll has climbed in a matter of days.
What happens next depends on whether contact tracing, community trust and treatment capacity can catch up with a virus that is spreading beyond known chains. If new cases continue to appear outside monitored contacts, the outbreak could keep growing and cross more borders; if health teams can reach the untraced chains, protect their own workers and persuade more sick people to seek care early, the curve could yet be bent. For now, the milestone of 5,000 deaths stands as a measure of how far that task still has to go.
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