Updated June 5, 2026 at 5:40 PM EDT
Ebola outbreak that's raging in Africa could rival the outbreak that hit West Africa a decade ago, resulting in 20,000 cases and at least 4,000 deaths within the next three months alone.
These projections appear in new analyses from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which modeled just how bad the current outbreak could get.
Both Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda are racing to contain this big outbreak of Ebola that prompted the World Health Organization to declare an international health emergency.
But according to three new papers published Friday afternoon from CDC, large-scale and sustained public health interventions need to be put in place rapidly to reduce spread of the disease to avoid a worse-case scenario.
"If only 20% of cases enter isolation within two days of symptom onset, more than 20,000 cases are projected in two out of three of our scenarios," said Jason Asher from the CDC's Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics at a late-afternoon press briefing where the analyses were released.
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Those 20,000 cases would occur in just the next three months, according to projections. If the outbreak continues beyond that, the numbers could climb much higher, which would make this the worst Ebola outbreak on record.
About 28,000 cases occurred in the 2014-2016 outbreak in West Africa, which is the largest to date.
While the worst-case scenario seems dire, the CDC said the conditions on the ground are difficult right now, including active conflict and difficulties accessing healthcare. The agency says isolating people after they are exposed to the virus is the key to limiting the spread.
And if international efforts can increase the number of those isolating, the scale of the outbreak could be far lower.
"If 70% of cases started isolating within that two-day period, there's a 94% probability of limiting the outbreak to fewer than 10,000 cases" in the next three months, Asher said.
Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, said, "The analysis affirms what we have worried about since the beginning: This outbreak is following a dangerous trajectory and will get a lot worse unless we do more to stop it at its source."
One of the three papers released Friday specifically addresses the risk to the U.S., concluding the risk remains low. While Ebola is a very dangerous disease, it doesn't spread nearly as easily as, say, COVID or the flu, and the U.S. has the capability to quickly identify cases and isolate people.
"The domestic risk remains low for the general US population," said Satish Pillai, the CDC Ebola response incident manager. He says there's no reason anyone should change their behavior, or even worry about traveling internationally other than to the Democratic Republic of Congo or Uganda.
Despite the dire warnings, Pillai reiterated that it's not too late to act. "We've responded to Ebola outbreaks before," he said. "We know how to end this. Our goal is control, containment and ending the outbreaks in DRC and Uganda. And we are working every day towards that goal."
In an opinion piece for The Washington Post Thursday, Anthony Banbury ,a former U.N. official who led the U.N. Mission for Ebola Emergency Response, warned that the "Ebola crisis in Africa will spin out of control without a significant shift in the international response. " He argued that a coordinated international response is needed now to stem the rising tide of cases.
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