This is going to get much worse.
And it didn’t have to be this way. [This, even as Gilead donates 2,000 vials of remdesivir — a therapeutic — to the DRC health missions. This amount is far short of what will be needed though, to be clear.] Here’s the latest — from CIDRAP:
…Among the dead are two victims who were living in a displacement camp in eastern DRC, which has been plagued by conflict between the government and rebel groups. According to Reuters, the mother and daughter, who died on May 31 and June 1 and later tested positive for Ebola, were living in a camp that’s hosting 30,000 internally displaced people in cramped and unsanitary conditions.
“We are all really worried that Ebola in these camps will spread extremely quickly and that there will be panic and people will flee all over whether or not they’re contacts, whether or not they’re ill,” Caitlin Brady, country director for the Danish Refugee Council in Congo, told the news agency.
Officials with the World Health Organization (WHO) said the number of affected health zones in DRC is growing.
“Every day, cases are being identified in new health zones. And that reflects really the scale of this outbreak, a scale that is much bigger than what is being detected and the high mobility of the population in this part of the DRC,” Olivier le Polain, PhD, of the WHO said at a press conference today….
This may well become the second worst outbreak in recorded history — even as world-wide, various entities are racing to develop both therapeutics — and a mRNA vaccine, for the current “Bundibugyo” variant of the Ebola virus.
[We won’t update our totals in the graphic, as it is not clear that the “official” counts are accurate. They ignore hundreds who were ill and died — before the world became aware that a new outbreak was underway. We will update our counts to match the official WHO count, when/if the totals reach 1,000 “official” deaths, next.]
This is a fraught moment, indeed. Onward, resolutely — just the same.
नमस्ते
Powerline Lies... 