Ebola Death Toll Tops 500 in Congo as Exhausted Health Workers Threaten to Walk Off the Job

The Ebola outbreak tearing through the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has killed more than 500 people, the World Health Organization said this week, as the epidemic showed few signs of slowing and the health workers fighting it warned they were on the verge of walking off the job.

As of July 4, the country had recorded 1,561 confirmed cases and 506 deaths, according to figures compiled by the WHO. Neighboring Uganda has reported an additional 20 cases and two deaths. The epidemic, declared on May 15, is caused by the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, for which there is no licensed vaccine and no approved treatment — a crucial difference from the more familiar Zaire strain that vaccines have been developed to fight.

Ituri province remains the hardest-hit region, accounting for 1,417 cases and 424 deaths across 24 of its 36 health zones. Case-fatality rates in some pockets have been staggering: officials reported a 50.7 percent mortality rate in the town of Mongbwalu and 57.4 percent in parts of North Kivu, a reflection of how quickly the disease can kill and how many patients are reaching care too late. Of those infected, 628 have been hospitalized in isolation and 254 have recovered, while contact tracers report following up on roughly 82 percent of identified contacts.

The response is being strained from within. Frontline health workers, exhausted after weeks of grueling shifts, have threatened to strike over months of unpaid wages and missing supplies — even as dozens of them have themselves contracted Ebola while treating patients. Their warning threatens to hollow out an already fragile system in a region long destabilized by armed conflict, where reaching remote villages is dangerous and slow.

There were some signs of scientific progress. The WHO said a clinical trial of two candidate treatments had begun, and emergency-use authorization was granted for the first molecular diagnostic test capable of quickly confirming the Bundibugyo strain. Still, officials cautioned against optimism. The agency said the outbreak's "true scale has not yet been fully established" and that while it would like to say the epidemic was stabilizing, it could not yet do so. Ebola has killed more than 15,000 people across Africa over the past half-century; the deadliest previous outbreak in Congo, between 2018 and 2020, claimed nearly 2,300 lives.