Ebola virus disease – Democratic Republic of the Congo

It has been over 21 days since the last confirmed case of Ebola virus disease (EVD) has been reported (Figure 1). On 9 March, the last 46 contacts finished their follow-up. These are important milestones in the outbreak as over one maximum incubation period has passed without any confirmed cases of EVD. However, there is still a high risk of re-emergence of EVD, and a critical need to maintain response operations – as outlined in the WHO recommended criteria for declaring the end of the EVD outbreak.

Extensive surveillance, pathogen detection, clinical management and other response activities are currently ongoing. These include, but are not limited to, investigating and validating new alert cases, supporting appropriate care and rapid diagnostics of suspected cases which continue to be detected each day, and supporting survivors through a multi-disciplinary programme to help mitigate potential risks of re-emergence. Over the course of the past week (4–10 March 2020), over 32 000 alerts were reported and investigated, and 2584 alerts were validated as suspected cases; requiring specialized care and laboratory testing to rule-out EVD. From 2 to 8 March, 2818 samples were tested including: 1574 blood samples from alive, suspected cases; 376 swabs from community deaths; and 868 samples from re-tested patients. Overall, this was a 16% decrease in testing compared to the previous week.

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