A new school year began Tuesday in Ituri, the epicenter of the Democratic Republic of Congo's Bundibugyo-strain Ebola outbreak, over a teacher-union request to delay. [2] AP photographed temperature checks at the door. [2] The case ledgers that this paper recorded Monday as two counts past 6,000, still accelerating did not improve overnight.
Local authorities, as of Monday, still reported 6,100 confirmed cases and 2,950 deaths. [1] [2] [4] Al Jazeera, using a separate table as of August 31, printed 6,041 cases and 2,911 deaths. [3] Those are the same two ledgers as Monday. They still do not match. Neither is a plateau.
"The response is growing and has been scaled up, but the virus is moving faster," Tom Fletcher, the U.N. emergency relief coordinator, said Tuesday. [1] "And unless we scale up urgently, more lives will be lost and the threat will grow." [1] The U.N. put the remaining funding gap at $1.1 billion. [1] In the first 100 days after the outbreak was declared on May 15, WHO counted 5,515 cases and 2,642 deaths in Congo; the first 100 days of the 2014-2016 West Africa epidemic produced 635 cases and 399 deaths. [1]
Children aged four and under have the highest case-fatality rate of any age group, 60 percent. [2] There is still no approved vaccine or specific treatment for Bundibugyo. [2] [3] Congolese authorities have begun giving Ervebo, the Zaire-strain shot, to front-line health workers; WHO is running a trial to learn whether it protects against this outbreak's actual virus. [2] [3] A parent in Bunia, Dieudonne Lotsima, asked the government to postpone classes until a shot specific to this strain exists. [3] Aimerance Vahweka kept her child home. "I do not really see an increase in prevention measures," she told AP. [2]
The Ituri 1 Teachers' Inter-Union Committee had called the epidemiological situation unfit for a safe return. [2] [3] Budju Lobo Isaac, a union member, listed the minimums still missing in many schools: handwashing, sanitizer, thermal scanners, and support for teachers. [3] Some government schools in Ituri recorded low turnout. [2] Education officials said they were distributing infrared thermometers and wash basins. [2] Greg Ramm of Save the Children in Congo named the constraint the photographs skip: many schools lack clean water, and deliveries to remote sites lag. [2]
The Ministry of Education is not running a single national rule. Raissa Malu, the education minister, said on August 18 that 40 of 138 educational subdivisions in affected provinces were touched by the outbreak, 18 of them high risk. [3] Highest-risk pupils are supposed to work from printed sheets and radio, not the internet. [3] Dounia Dekhili, UNICEF's emergency coordinator in Congo, called the job "both to protect the health of students, teachers, and communities, and to preserve, as much as possible, children's right to learn." [2] Yap Boum, Africa CDC's incident manager for Bundibugyo, treated the return as a chance to send prevention messages home with children. [3] Those are operating theories. They are not a sitrep.
Fletcher allocated more than $57 million from the U.N. Central Emergency Response Fund and noted IOM's nearly 23 million health screenings in Congo and neighboring countries. [1] He also named the overlay this thread has carried since July: a health emergency on top of armed conflict, displacement, and unpaid health workers who have already struck. [1] [2] The outbreak has reached more than 60 health zones. Authorities believe it was spreading undetected from at least February. [2] WHO has said it is on track to surpass the West Africa epidemic of 2014-2016. [2] MONUSCO, the U.N. peacekeeping mission, is expanding programs that have helped more than 60,000 people reach farmland and schools in Djugu territory, even as it answers clashes involving Congolese forces, Ugandan soldiers, and suspected Allied Democratic Forces fighters in the same east that holds the epicenter. [1] "It is not simply a health emergency," Fletcher said. "It is also a humanitarian emergency layered onto many existing humanitarian emergencies." [1]
Etienne Ndjabu, a teacher at a Bunia private school, said staff were raising student awareness about handwashing and sanitizer. [2] That is what a classroom can do. It is not contact tracing. Uganda contained its latest outbreak with detection, confirmation, tracing, isolation, clinical care, infection control, community engagement, and surveillance. [1] Congo's classrooms opened anyway.
A school-year photograph and a funding appeal can both be true on the same Tuesday. Neither changes the instruction from Monday. Keep the two ledgers labeled. Keep them unmerged. The virus is still moving faster than the response, and the shot on hand is still the wrong strain.
-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Tokyo