Resurgence of Ebola in North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo - Feb 2021
Disease
How the score is calculated
The score starts at 8. It adds points from recorded affected, deaths, displaced and casualty counts, plus terms found in the story title, event type or status. For each count, only its highest matching band is used.
- Affected people
- 1–999: +5 · 1,000–9,999: +12 · 10,000–99,999: +20 · 100,000–999,999: +28 · 1 million+: +35
- Deaths
- 1–9: +8 · 10–99: +14 · 100–999: +22 · 1,000+: +30
- Displaced people
- 1–9,999: +6 · 10,000–99,999: +12 · 100,000+: +18
- Casualties
- 100 or more: +8
- Story wording
- +10 for terms such as catastrophe, famine, war, conflict, major earthquake, mass casualty or critical. Otherwise, +5 for active, ongoing, emergency, outbreak, cyclone or hurricane.
Score bands: Watch 0–24 · Moderate 25–49 · High 50–74 · Critical 75–100. Scores are capped at 100. Missing or unparseable figures add no points.
This is a rule-based WorldsAid triage indicator, not an official or independently validated classification. It does not account for recency or local context, and it can understate events with incomplete reporting. Check the linked sources.
Historical record
Status: CLOSED · Imported 2026-10-07
Closed for this historical import at the site owner’s request; not a new assessment of current conditions.
In brief
- What happenedBrazzaville – The Ministry of Health of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) today announced that a new case of Ebola has been detected in Butembo, a city in North Kivu Province, where a previous outbreak was declared over in June 2020.
- How many affectedDeaths: 2299
- What help is neededResponse priorities should be confirmed in the linked source reports as needs change.
What changed
First retained snapshot
No earlier verified snapshot is present in the recovered dataset. This record remains available as the historical baseline.
Situation
Brazzaville – The Ministry of Health of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) today announced that a new case of Ebola has been detected in Butembo, a city in North Kivu Province, where a previous outbreak was declared over in June 2020. The Butembo branch of the National Institute of Biomedical Research (INRB) confirmed Ebola in samples taken from a patient with Ebola-like symptoms who had sought treatment at a local health centre. The woman was the wife of an Ebola survivor. She has since died. Butembo was one of the epicentres of the previous Ebola outbreak in eastern DRC. It is not unusual for sporadic cases to occur following a major outbreak. Due to the enormous local capacity built in the previous outbreak, the North Kivu Provincial health authorities are leading the current response with support from the Ministry of Health and the World Health Organization (WHO). WHO provided training to laboratory technicians, contact tracers, local vaccination teams and reached out to community groups to raise Ebola awareness as well as put in place an Ebola survivor programme. “The expertise and capacity of local health teams has been critical in detecting this new Ebola case and paving the way for a timely response,” said Dr Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa. “WHO is providing support to local and national health authorities to quickly trace, identify and treat the contacts to curtail the further spread of the virus.” WHO epidemiologists are on the ground investigating the case. Already more than 70 contacts have been identified. Disinfection of sites visited by patient is also ongoing. Samples from the confirmed Ebola patient have been sent to the National Institute of Biomedical Research’s main laboratory in Kinshasa for genome sequencing to identify the strain of the Ebola and to determine its link to the previous outbreak. The DRC’s 10th Ebola outbreak which lasted for nearly two years was the second largest in the world and by the time it ended there were 3481 cases, 2299 deaths and 1162 survivors. Response to the outbreak was particularly challenging due to insecurity that disrupted emergency efforts. For Additional Information or to Request Interviews, Please contact: Eugene Kabambi Emergency Communications Officer Tel : +243 81 715 1697 Office : +47 241 39 027 Email: kabambie@who.int Collins Boakye-Agyemang Communications and marketing officer Tel: + 242 06 520 65 65 (WhatsApp) Email: boakyeagyemangc@who.int Sakuya OKA Communications Manager WHO Regional Office for Africa Cell: +242 06 508 1009 Email: okas@who.int
Linked charities and agencies
WorldsAid verification
A WorldsAid editor reviewed this record against 1 attributed source, cleaned feed formatting and checked the crisis, place and reporting date. 1 human-impact figure was separated from the narrative and dated where the source allowed. Earlier observations remain in the evidence history instead of being silently overwritten.
Verified figures
- Deaths
- 2299 retained at 2021-02-09
What we knew when
- WorldsAid record entered the retained historical dataset.
- Last verification represented by this immutable snapshot.
Earlier figures are never replaced by later values; additional observations are retained as new ledger entries.
Provenance
This page renders the last verified WorldsAid cache directly in HTML. It does not treat generated summaries as primary evidence.
Cached dataset: worldsai_drup771.sql.gz
Verified
SHA-256 607ee82df0796dde9e9298616b79cfbfc17b18b54ae877ec60da43a8e7f22889