Exhausted health workers in Congo struggle to keep up as Ebola outpaces contact tracing

NIZI, Congo -- Every day, community health worker Gédéon Banga Ngbape and his team fan out across communities in eastern Congo looking for people who may have crossed paths with the country’s fastest-growing Ebola outbreak in history.The workers investigate dozens of alerts, search for those exposed to suspected or confirmed cases and try to get anyone showing symptoms into care before the virus spreads further.But the surveillance system is increasingly failing to keep pace with the virus. Between 60% and 70% of new Ebola cases are being detected among people who were not already being monitored as contacts, meaning health workers may only discover infections after patients become sick and have had opportunities to expose others.“If surveillance does not work well, the entire response suffers,” Ngbape said. “Surveillance is the engine of a response.”The outbreak has killed over 2,200 people out of more than 4,700 cases, according to the latest government figures. This death toll has been reached almost three times faster than in the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa — the worst in history. That outbreak claimed over 11,000 lives.“We are chasing the virus; the virus is ahead of...