DRC's Ministry of Health, reporting a day after the WHO log on 14 June, counted 782 confirmed cases and 181 deaths, with 359 patients in isolation, meaning 45.9 percent of confirmed cases were isolated in a treatment unit1. The ministry is the national surveillance authority for the outbreak, and its count runs a day later and slightly higher than WHO's confirmed reference total.
The CDC, the United States federal public health agency, published a reproduction-number model on 5 June that named patient isolation, not contact follow-up, as the variable that decides this outbreak. At the model's R0 of 2.51, every infected person passes the virus to roughly two and a half others if nothing intervenes. The model measured one thing: how many confirmed cases reach a treatment bed where they cannot infect anyone else. At 20 percent isolation, its worst case of 20,000 cases by August occurs in 65 percent of simulation runs. At 70 percent isolation, that worst case collapses to a one-in-a-hundred tail.
DRC's 45.9 percent sits between those two poles, above the baseline that drives the model toward catastrophe but well below the threshold that breaks the chain. The Africa CDC's science advisors point to continuing attacks on health facilities as the reason a traced contact often cannot be moved into a bed. A contact found by phone but unable to reach a treatment unit still transmits. That is the gap the isolation number measures and the tracing number hides.
