The Bundibugyo outbreak in DR Congo reached 1,094 confirmed cases and 277 deaths by Wednesday 24 June, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) reported, with Uganda at 20 cases and two deaths1. It is the largest outbreak of this Ebola species on record, more than seven times the roughly 149 cases of the 2007 Uganda outbreak in which the species was first identified2. Africa CDC Director-General Jean Kaseya told an African Union heads-of-state meeting the toll "will be worse than what we had in West Africa", invoking the 2014-16 epidemic that killed more than 11,000 people3.
The number that decides the outbreak's direction is not the case count but the share of patients in isolation. On Tuesday 23 June, 387 of 1,094 patients were isolated, about 35%, down from 45.9% on 14 June4. CDC modelling puts the outbreak's reproduction number, the average number of people each case infects, at 2.51 and identifies a 70% isolation rate as the threshold needed to collapse worst-case trajectories. At 35% and falling, the response sits well inside the range where the model's grimmest curves, not its containment runs, apply.
That fork is mechanical, not rhetorical. Every confirmed patient left in the community is a node from which the virus can branch at a rate above two; pulling isolation toward 70% severs those branches faster than they form, while letting it drift toward a third widens them. The crossing past 1,000 cases is the headline, but the isolation figure is the lever, and it is the one slipping. No treatment has yet reached a single patient, leaving case management and isolation as the only tools currently in play.
