The Ebola outbreak tearing through the Democratic Republic of Congo has killed more than 2,000 people in under three months, and the World Health Organization now warns it is on pace to become the deadliest Ebola epidemic ever recorded.

Congolese health officials confirmed 4,381 cases and 2,011 deaths as of August 11 across five provinces, according to the Washington Post. At least 1,000 of those deaths have come in just the last three weeks alone — a pace of acceleration that has alarmed epidemiologists tracking the virus's spread through the conflict-torn eastern provinces of the country.

It is already the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record and the second-largest in history, trailing only the catastrophic 2014-2016 West African epidemic that killed 11,310 people across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, per Al Jazeera. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said this week the outbreak is "on track" to surpass that 2014-2016 toll if the current trajectory holds.

A Strain Without a Vaccine

Complicating the response: the outbreak, first declared in Ituri Province in May, is caused by the rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola virus — not the Zaire strain that existing approved vaccines and monoclonal antibody treatments were built to fight. That leaves responders largely reliant on supportive care and containment measures like contact tracing and isolation, tools that have struggled to keep pace as the virus spreads through areas where armed conflict has made health workers' access difficult and dangerous.

THE OUTBREAK IS ALREADY THE LARGEST IN CONGO'S HISTORY — ITS 17TH SURGE OF THE DISEASE SINCE EBOLA WAS FIRST IDENTIFIED THERE IN 1976.

The current toll puts this outbreak just behind the DRC's own previous record, the 2018-2020 epidemic in North Kivu that killed nearly 2,300 people out of roughly 3,500 cases — meaning Congo's current outbreak has already killed nearly as many people in a fraction of the time. The UN reported this week that a new Ebola treatment center has opened at the heart of the crisis in an effort to keep up with demand.

The World Health Organization has been racing to deploy experimental countermeasures and additional personnel, but officials describe the response as chronically underfunded relative to the scale of the crisis, with the outbreak spreading across a geographic footprint far larger than earlier Congolese epidemics.

What's Next

Health officials say containment now hinges on whether vaccine trials targeting the Bundibugyo strain can be fast-tracked and whether security conditions in eastern Congo stabilize enough to let responders reach every affected community. Until then, the WHO says it is bracing for the death toll to keep climbing — and for the grim possibility that history's worst Ebola outbreak is still being written in real time.