A hundred days in, the DRC's Ebola outbreak has crossed 2,000 deaths, and the trajectory hasn't flattened.
More than 2,000 people have died from Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since the first case of this epidemic was recorded in May.
In the DRC's outbreak zone, day 100 without a bent curve is the number epidemiologists watch, not the death toll alone; it signals current containment measures aren't working at the rate they need to. The DRC's own 2018-2020 North Kivu outbreak, its deadliest before this one, took roughly two years to close. This one is moving faster at a comparable stage.
More than 2,000 people have died from Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo since the first case was recorded in May, putting the outbreak at the 100-day mark with no clear sign of flattening. A death toll this size, this early in an outbreak's timeline, is what puts historians of the disease on alert.
Ebola outbreaks are usually judged less by their peak than by how long they take to bend downward once containment measures are in place. A hundred days without that bend happening is a longer runway than most prior DRC outbreaks needed to turn the corner.
Whether this becomes the deadliest outbreak on record depends on the next hundred days, not the last hundred. The trajectory so far gives no reason to assume it corrects on its own.
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