21 hours ago
9
Health workers don protective equipment at an Ebola treatment center on June 2, 2026 in Monigi, Democratic Republic of Congo. Daniel Buuma/Getty Images hide caption
toggle caption
Daniel Buuma/Getty Images
Want to keep up with the latest Ebola news from this year's outbreak? Subscribe to our global health newsletter.
The Ebola outbreak that's raging in Africa could rival the outbreak that hit West Africa a decade ago, resulting in upwards of 20,000 cases and 4,000 deaths within the next three months alone.
These projections appear in new analyses from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which modeled just how widespread the current outbreak could get.
Both Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda are racing to contain this outbreak, which was declared an international health emergency by the the World Health Organization in May.
The analyses published Friday afternoon by the CDC emphasize that large-scale and sustained public health interventions similar to those deployed in the 2014 West Africa outbreak are needed to avoid a worse-case scenario.
"If only 20% of cases enter isolation within two days of symptom onset, more than 20,000 cases are projected," said Jason Asher from the CDC's Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics at a late-afternoon press briefing where the analyses were released.
Those 20,000 cases would occur in just the next three months, according to projections. If the outbreak continues beyond that, the numbers could climb much higher, which would make this the worst Ebola outbreak on record.
About 28,000 cases occurred in the 2014-2016 outbreak in West Africa, which is the largest to date.
While the worst-case scenario may sound dire, conditions on the ground are difficult right now. During the outbreak a decade ago, there was a large and sustained international response. But the CDC notes that this new outbreak is occurring in an area where there's armed conflict, difficulties accessing healthcare and people are frequently displaced.
As one of the new analyses notes: "The scope of the outbreak is likely larger than that represented by available data and might prove challenging to contain and control."
The CDC says isolating people after they are exposed to the virus is the key to limiting the spread. And if international efforts can increase the number of those isolating, the scale of the outbreak could be far lower.
"If 70% of cases started isolating within that two-day period, there's a 94% probability of limiting the outbreak to fewer than 10,000 cases" in the next three months, Asher said.
Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, said, "The analysis affirms what we have worried about since the beginning: This outbreak is following a dangerous trajectory and will get a lot worse unless we do more to stop it at its source."
While the new CDC projections "correctly point to the potentially explosive nature of the outbreak and the importance of contact tracing and isolation in containing it," things don't necessarily need to be so pessimistic, says Justin Lessler, an epidemiologist with the University of North Carolina. He says local efforts to curtail the outbreak could make a difference.
That said, "a lot depends on where the virus gets to as it spreads across east Africa, which is home to large cities and densely populated areas, and outbreaks in the size range they project are completely possible," Lessler said.
One of the three papers released Friday specifically addresses the risk to the U.S. "The domestic risk remains low for the general U.S. population," said Satish Pillai, the CDC Ebola response incident manager.
However, the paper stated that this could change if the outbreak spreads to urban, international hubs.
While Ebola is a very dangerous disease, it doesn't spread nearly as easily as, say, COVID or the flu, and the U.S. has the capability to quickly identify cases and isolate people.
As of now, Pillai says there's no reason anyone in the U.S. should change their behavior, or even worry about traveling internationally other than to the Democratic Republic of Congo or Uganda.
Despite the dire warnings, Pillai reiterated that it's not too late to act. "We've responded to Ebola outbreaks before," he said. "We know how to end this. Our goal is control, containment and ending the outbreaks in DRC and Uganda. And we are working every day towards that goal."
But Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, says he's "very, very worried" about the current outbreak. Konyndyk was involved in the Ebola response when he worked at the United States Agency for International Development during the Obama administration.
"If I compare this to past outbreaks, this one has more momentum at time of detection than the huge West Africa outbreak in 2014 did," he told NPR.
The Trump administration dismantled USAID last year, and CDC has experienced ongoing challenges from funding cuts. Konyndyk says that could have hampered the initial response and allowed the virus to spread:
"We are just in a much, much weaker position now to respond to a challenging Ebola outbreak like this one than we would have been even 18 to 24 months ago."
Brown's Nuzzo is also concerned about the U.S. response to the current outbreak.
"The U.S. has always been a top leader in marshaling a swift and effective international response to contain deadly Ebola outbreaks," she said. "This time around the U.S. has spent much of the time on the sidelines."
