The Ebola outbreak that’s raging in Africa could rival the outbreak that hit West Africa a decade ago, resulting in 20,000 cases and at least 4,000 deaths within the next three months alone.
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These projections appear in new analyses from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which modeled just how bad the current outbreak could get.
Both Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda are racing to contain this big outbreak of Ebola that prompted the World Health Organization to declare an international health emergency.
But according to three new papers published Friday afternoon from CDC, large-scale and sustained public health interventions need to be put in place rapidly to reduce spread of the disease to avoid a worse-case scenario.
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“If only 20% of cases enter isolation within two days of symptom onset, more than 20,000 cases are projected in two out of three of our scenarios,” 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, unlike the outbreak in West Africa a decade ago, where there was a large and sustained international response, conditions on the ground are difficult right now. 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.”
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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.
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“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.
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.
Pillai says there’s no reason anyone should change their behavior, or even worry about traveling internationally other than to the Democratic Republic of Congo or Uganda.
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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.”
In an opinion piece for Thursday, Anthony Banbury, a former U.N. official who led the U.N. Mission for Ebola Emergency Response, warned that the “Ebola crisis in Africa will spin out of control without a significant shift in the international response.” He argued that a coordinated international response is needed now to stem the rising tide of cases.
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