DRC Ebola outbreak peaks as daily cases decline from 120 to 80

The Democratic Republic of the Congo announced this week that its Ebola outbreak has reached its peak. For the first time since authorities declared the epidemic in May, the rate at which people are contracting the virus has begun to slow. Daily confirmed cases have dropped from 120 to 80, according to Samuel Roger Kamba, the country's health minister, who framed the decline as evidence that transmission of the Bundibugyo variant is finally coming under control.

The numbers are substantial. As of mid-September, more than 7,200 people have tested positive for the virus, and nearly 3,475 have died. The outbreak is concentrated primarily in Ituri province, where active conflict has complicated every aspect of the response—from contact tracing to safe burial practices to the basic logistics of moving vaccines and medical personnel. Last week, Sud-Ubangi region, which borders Congo-Brazzaville and the Central African Republic, became the sixth province to report cases. This is the seventeenth Ebola outbreak the DRC has faced since the disease was first identified in 1976.

Kamba pointed to specific milestones as markers of progress. Ten of the country's sixty-two health zones have now gone more than twenty-two days without reporting a new case. Six zones have surpassed the forty-two-day threshold and have been removed from the active transmission list entirely. Four additional zones crossed the twenty-one-day mark and were similarly cleared. These metrics matter because they suggest the virus is no longer spreading freely through the population—a necessary condition for declaring an outbreak contained.

Yet the announcement has drawn immediate skepticism from those working closest to the crisis. Iracan Gratien de Saint-Nicolas, an MP representing Bunia, the capital of Ituri and the epicenter of the outbreak, warned against what he called triumphalism. He called for the government to release the full set of epidemiological indicators that would actually prove control—sustained declines over weeks, falling death counts, shrinking zones of active transmission, high rates of contact tracing, and dignified burial practices. Without transparency on these measures, he argued, public confidence will remain fragile.

Jean Kaseya, director general of the African Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, visited Bunia in early August and offered a more technical perspective on what peak actually means. He noted that sixty to seventy percent of deaths are occurring in the community rather than in treatment facilities, and that the list of contacts requiring monitoring continues to grow. Epidemiologists, he said, consider an outbreak truly peaked only when all new cases originate from people already on the contact list—a threshold the DRC has not yet reached. Containment and contact tracing, he stressed, remain insufficient.

The Bundibugyo variant itself presents an additional complication. Unlike the more common Zaire strain, for which the Ervebo vaccine exists and has been approved, there is no established treatment for Bundibugyo. The DRC received more than seventy thousand doses of Ervebo last month, but these cannot be deployed against the current outbreak. Clinical trials are underway in the region, but results remain months away.

In Rwampara, a town in Ituri, the exhaustion is palpable. Léa Munyere, a thirty-six-year-old mother of four, lost two close friends to the virus. She welcomed the government's announcement but spoke of the weight of the past months—the dread, the loss, the disruption to ordinary life. She said she hopes the disease will soon be declared over entirely, so that people can begin to reclaim what the outbreak has taken from them. The announcement of peak may signal the beginning of the end, but for communities that have lived with Ebola for four months, the end itself remains uncertain.