The World Health Organization reported sobering new figures Tuesday about the Ebola outbreak ravaging West Africa, saying that the number of new cases could reach 10,000 per week by December, about 10 times the rate of the past four weeks.
While the number of deaths so far is roughly half the number of confirmed, probable or suspected cases, the organization said that the mortality rate is closer to 70 percent.
WHO’s assistant director-general, Dr. Bruce Aylward, gave the grim figures during a news conference in Geneva. Previously, the agency had estimated the Ebola mortality rate at around 50 percent overall. In contrast, in events such as flu pandemics, the death rate is typically less than 2 percent.
Aylward acknowledged the recent surge in international pledges to combat Ebola’s spread, but he said that without a further escalation in help over the next 60 days, “a lot more people will die.”
Experts say the epidemic is doubling in size about every three weeks.
Aylward said the U.N. health agency was still focused on trying to get sick people isolated and to provide treatment as early as possible.
As of Tuesday, he said, the total number of confirmed, probable or suspected Ebola cases over the course of the epidemic had reached 8,914, with 4,447 deaths. The vast majority are in the three most afflicted countries: Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Just on Friday, the organization said that the deaths totaled 4,024 — indicating that hundreds more people have died in a matter of days.
Aylward, an infectious disease specialist who just completed a visit to West Africa, said the survival rate was now “30 percent at most in these countries,” even as the international campaign to fight it has escalated.
The epidemic has continued to expand geographically and now affects more areas than a month ago, including parts of Sierra Leone close to the border with Ivory Coast, Aylward said, and the number of infections was still rising in the capitals of the three worst-hit countries.
He described Ebola as “a high-mortality disease in any circumstance, but especially in these countries.”
For the last month, there have been about 1,000 new Ebola cases per week — including suspected, confirmed and probable cases, Aylward said. The U.N. agency was aiming to get 70 percent of Ebola cases isolated and 70 percent of victims safely buried by December to reverse the outbreak.
Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia have been the hardest-hit nations in the current epidemic, and Aylward said WHO was concerned about the spread of Ebola in their capital cities — Freetown, Conakry and Monrovia — where people move freely across borders.
Aylward said there was no evidence that any countries were hiding Ebola cases, but he said countries bordering the affected area, including Ivory Coast, Mali and Guinea-Bissau, were at high risk of importing the disease.
“This is not a virus that’s easy to suppress or hide,” he said, noting that Ebola has not spread very much internationally. “I don’t expect this virus to just go anywhere. There is exit screening in place, and sick people won’t be moving.”
Health workers have been hit hard by the virus, which is spread by contact with bodily fluids like blood, vomit and diarrhea. Doctors Without Borders said 16 of its employees had been infected with Ebola, and nine of them have died.
Speaking Tuesday in Johannesburg, the head of the charity’s South African unit, Sharon Ekambaram, said medical workers have received woefully inadequate assistance from the international community.
“We’ve all heard their promises in the media but have seen very little on the ground,” Ekambaram said.
The Associated Press,
The New York Times