The Democratic Republic of the Congo, DRC, has recorded 7,404 confirmed Ebola cases, including 3,577 deaths, as the outbreak shifts from Ituri to North Kivu.
This is according to the latest government situation report.
The report, released on Thursday, said transmission was declining in Ituri, the long-time epicentre of the outbreak, but rising rapidly in North Kivu, where treatment facilities were approaching full capacity.
It said 1,776 patients had recovered, while the overall case fatality rate stood at 48.3 per cent.
The outbreak has affected 62 health zones across seven provinces, with Ituri accounting for 77.7 per cent of all confirmed cases.
North Kivu is facing significant pressure on treatment facilities, with 373 patients hospitalised and bed occupancy reaching 94.7 per cent, the report said.
Jean-Jacques Muyembe, head of the country’s National Institute of Biomedical Research, said earlier on Tuesday in Kinshasa that Ituri had passed its “peak” and entered a “downward slope”.
Muyembe, however, said the epidemic curve in North Kivu was still rising and had “not yet reached the plateau”.
He described the province as another major hotspot in the outbreak.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organisation, WHO, said on Wednesday that the response was showing encouraging signs in some of the worst-affected areas, particularly Ituri.
He warned, however, that the epidemic continued to expand and claim lives.
Tedros said weekly cases in North Kivu had almost doubled in the past two weeks, increasing from about 100 to more than 200.
“The area is so vast that it is hard to speak of a single epidemic. It is many outbreaks, in many places,” he said at a press briefing in Geneva.
The outbreak is the largest and deadliest Ebola epidemic in the DRC’s history and the second largest globally, after the 2014-2016 epidemics in West Africa.
Xinhua/NAN
