DR Congo Ebola death toll surpasses 2,000 as outbreak continues to spread

The outbreak has killed 2,111 people out of 4,381 confirmed cases, putting the case fatality rate at approximately 45.9 percent.

“We haven’t reached the peak yet,” Health Minister Samuel Roger Kamba said in a post on X. He added that authorities expect to bring the spread under control within the next three months and begin seeing a decline in new cases.

The latest outbreak is spreading across conflict-affected areas in eastern and northeastern DRC, where limited state presence and inadequate health infrastructure are complicating efforts to contain the disease.

The scale of the epidemic is increasingly approaching that of the 2018-2020 Ebola outbreak, which remains the deadliest recorded in the DRC. That outbreak killed nearly 2,300 people from around 3,500 recorded cases.

The current outbreak originated in Ituri province in northeastern DRC and has since spread to several provinces, including parts of North Kivu and other areas in the east.

The DRC declared the latest outbreak on May 15, making it the country’s 17th Ebola outbreak and, according to health authorities, the largest in its history.

The spread of Ebola in conflict-affected communities has presented additional challenges for health workers, with fragile infrastructure and insecurity making access to affected populations more difficult.

Earlier, it was reported that the Ebola Bundibugyo virus had spread to camps for internally displaced people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).