The response

An alert is a report — a sick person, a death, a rumour — that teams must go and check. Roughly one in five is validated as a suspected case and sampled. Many alerts means surveillance is looking; the validated share says what it finds.

Positivity is the share of samples that confirm the virus. It measures how well tests are targeted, not how many people are infected: when it rises while the number of samples stalls, only the obvious patients are being sampled and others are being missed.

Every confirmed case leaves contacts to follow for twenty-one days. Their number is the size of the outbreak as the response sees it; the share seen each day is the grip it keeps on it — below the threshold, exposed people transmit undetected.

A saturated treatment centre pushes patients back into the community, where deaths occur outside care. The site counts hospitalised patients — confirmed and suspected — per 100 beds the bulletin declares; above 100 there are more patients than beds, and the surplus is cared for outside the planned beds. This is not the bulletin's occupancy rate, which counts only patients lying in beds.

The Ervebo vaccine is reserved for those most exposed to the virus: health-care staff first, then other front-line workers — hygienists, safe burial teams — and, in Bas-Uélé, high-risk contacts under a so-called compassionate vaccination scheme. The campaign began on 26 August 2026 in Buta, then in Kisangani the next day; Ituri published its first vaccinations on 23 September.