Community First: The Key to Stopping the Ebola Epidemic

The tenth Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was declared in August 2018. Nineteen months later, it has resulted in over 3,400 confirmed and probable cases and more than 2,200 deaths. By October 2019, the head of the Ebola response, Dr. Jean-Jacques Muyembe, and the Congolese government in Kinshasa were predicting that the outbreak would come to an end before the year was out. They had good reasons for this optimism: the caseload had fallen to an average of eight a week in the first three weeks of November – a sharp decline on the 112 cases or so a week at the peak of the outbreak in May 2019. Transmission had been confined to a small set of four neighbouring health zones. An air of hope prevailed among response actors.