Why the Ebola Outbreak Has Been Nearly Impossible to Stop

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**Natalie Kitroeff** (0:27)
From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroeff. This is The Daily.
At the front lines of the Ebola crisis in Central Africa, badly equipped health workers with little outside support are losing the fight against one of the worst outbreaks in history. Today, my colleague Declan Walsh takes us to the epicenter of the virus to understand why, so far, its spread has been nearly impossible to stop. It's Wednesday, June 3rd. Declan, thank you so much for doing this. Where are you right now?

**Declan Walsh** (1:15)
I'm in Bunya, a city in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (1:20)
Okay, so you've been in the DRC for about a week and a half, covering this horrific Ebola outbreak. So just tell us what you're seeing, what it's been like on the ground.

**Declan Walsh** (1:32)
It's a really dire situation here right now.
This outbreak was only detected just over two weeks ago, but the virus was probably spreading for two, some groups are saying even three months before it was detected. And so we just don't know how deep, how wide it has gotten into the population in these areas. And that's really hampered efforts, not just to treat the people affected by the disease, but to contain its spread.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (2:00)
And in terms of numbers, cases, deaths, where do things stand?

**Declan Walsh** (2:05)
So far, about 250 people are confirmed to have died. There are about another 1,100 suspected cases. But the true spread and extent of this virus is thought to be much, much wider than that. And I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the virus is way ahead of the response at this point.
Already, this is the third largest Ebola outbreak on record. And there are groups saying that it has the potential to become the largest ever. Now, that's a very high bar. The largest Ebola outbreak was between 2014 and 2016 in West Africa. That killed 11,000 people.
We're far off those numbers. But the fact that the response is so far behind the curve makes it, obviously, much, much harder to start to push it back.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (2:57)
So what do we know about how this started and how it went undetected for so long?

**Declan Walsh** (3:02)
Because of that huge delay, there's so much we still don't know. But one thing that seems to be almost certain is that this outbreak started in this gold mining town called Mongwalu. That's about 50 miles north of Bunya, of the regional capital.
So a couple of days after I got here with our photographer, Arlette Bashizi, we got in a car and we drove to Mongwalu. To find not just the town where it started, but also what the response looked like in this place where, as far as we had heard, there was the greatest number of infections.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (3:40)
And what did you find?

**Declan Walsh** (3:41)
Well, first, the road to get there was quite difficult. It was really a road just to name. It was made of mud. It was extremely rough and bumpy. But all along that road, we passed these Congolese military checkpoints. And that was because we were passing through territory where at least three or four different militias were known to operate. So that was complicating the response and also preventing aid workers from getting to this town.
And when we got to Montbalbo itself, we went straight to the public hospital, which we knew was the center of treatment efforts. We were expecting really to see the architecture of an Ebola response that you classically think of. For some of us, it's maybe a Hollywood reference, like movies like Outbreak and so on, these large white tents, lots of people walking around in sealed suits.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (4:39)
Right.

**Declan Walsh** (4:39)
But there was almost nothing. And we went into the actual Ebola wards themselves. We put on the full protective equipment. We spoke to the staff. We found a doctor who wanted to take us inside. And there, honestly, it was pretty shocking.
Apart from the doctor who brought me in, the ward was just full of people who had come to help the Ebola patients. He has three sisters.