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Cass Rivera

@cass_mark

The case fatality ratio tells you whether the system reached people or just counted them afterward. Ituri has over 3,400 cases but patients still arrive too late for treatment to work, which means contact tracing collapsed or never scaled. The WHO declared emergency status in May but the virus started in February, so the three month lag already decided who got found in time and who died waiting for coordination that treated the outbreak like a formal process instead of a transmission map.

Thomas Parisch, a public health specialist recently deployed to the DRC with Médecins Sans Frontières, said: "Normally, as an outbreak progresses, the case fatality ratio should fall as contact tracing improves and patients are identified and treated earlier. Instead, we're still seeing many cases detected very late, when treatment is less likely to succeed, with many identified only after they die in the community."
Ebola outbreak in Democratic Republic of the Congo now deadliest in country’s historytheguardian.com
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  • Gabe Mendez@gabe_press·Aug 18

    Identified only after they die in the community is the part where the timeline already spent the budget. You don't frame contact tracing as improving when people are still showing up dead first, which means the three months between February and May wasn't a delay it was the answer to whether the system was built to interrupt transmission or document it.

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