“The window for controlling this outbreak is closing,” said Adam Kucharski, a research fellow in infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
New estimates from the World Health Organization warn the number of Ebola cases could hit 21,000 in six weeks unless efforts to curb the outbreak are ramped up, according to an analysis published online Tuesday by the New England Journal of Medicine.
Since the first cases were reported six months ago, the tally of cases in West Africa has reached an estimated 5,800 illnesses. WHO officials say cases are continuing to increase exponentially and Ebola could sicken people for years to come without better control measures.
But the U.N. health agency has warned that tallies of recorded cases and deaths are likely to be gross underestimates. For instance, it noted Tuesday that the true death toll for Liberia, the hardest-hit country in the outbreak, may never be known, since bodies of people dying in a crowded slum in the capital have simply been thrown into rivers.
Based partially on the assumption that cases are being underreported, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to release far direr predictions Tuesday. A draft version of the report obtained by The Associated Press says there could be as many as 21,000 cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone alone by the end of the month and that cases could balloon well past 1 million by late January. Experts caution those predictions don’t take into account response efforts.
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