Of everything in the World Health Organization's latest bulletin on the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, start with the two numbers that measure whether the response itself can hold: 151 health workers have been infected, and 44 of them have died [1]. The people whose job is to stop the outbreak are among its casualties at a rate of roughly one death per three or four infections, in line with the outbreak's overall lethality, and every one of those 44 deaths also subtracts a trained responder from a response that has too few.
The WHO's Disease Outbreak News bulletin, current as of July 30, puts the outbreak at 3,605 confirmed cases and 1,589 deaths, a case fatality rate of 44 percent [1]. The arithmetic checks: 1,589 of 3,605 is 44.1 percent. By the WHO's own accounting this is the largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded in the DRC, surpassing the 2018-20 outbreak's 3,317 cases [1]. It is still accelerating: week 30 was the worst week of the outbreak so far, with 567 cases and 296 deaths in a single week [1]. One piece of better news sits in the same bulletin, across the border: Uganda declared its own outbreak over on July 28 [1].
Al Jazeera's reporting dated August 4 gives newer figures: 1,707 deaths among 3,802 cases [2]. Those are different numbers from a different date, and we print them separately rather than blending them into the WHO's. Read side by side, the two snapshots imply roughly 118 more recorded deaths and about 197 more recorded cases across five days, with the caveat that the two counts come from different reporting pipelines and the subtraction is indicative, not official [1][2].
The strain matters as much as the counts. This is Bundibugyo ebolavirus, for which no approved vaccine exists, and Al Jazeera describes the epidemic as the second-largest and fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record, with the WHO accelerating vaccine trials in response [2]. The largest, West Africa in 2014-16, ended with tools this response does not have for this strain: a proven vaccine came out of that emergency, but it targets a different species of the virus.
A note on numbers we are not printing. Higher death figures are circulating in secondary snippets and aggregator text, and none of them traces to a primary source we could fetch. They may eventually prove correct, outbreak counts move in one direction, but a plausible guess is not a count, and this piece carries only figures that appear in the WHO's bulletin or in Al Jazeera's dated reporting, each attributed to its date.
That discipline points at the actual story of this week: the freshest verifiable national count for the second-largest Ebola outbreak in history is six days old. We searched for anything dated after August 4 and found nothing checkable. During the 2018-20 outbreak, updates were a drumbeat; this one has fallen far enough out of the world's attention that the vacuum is being filled by unsourced figures instead of official ones. The 44 dead health workers counted through July 30 worked inside that vacuum. The record deserves to be kept current, and when the next dated bulletin lands, we will print it.
