Dr. Céline Goundermedical correspondent, CBS News · physician, epidemiologist, medical journalist

More Hospitals Won't Stop Ebola. Here's What Will.

Name: More Hospitals Won't Stop Ebola. Here's What Will.
Uploaded: 2026-06-13T19:11:05+00:00
Duration: 45 s
Channel: Dr. Céline Gounder
Description: In this segment Dr. Céline Gounder explains that simply adding more hospitals and beds will not halt Ebola transmission. She highlights a cascading…

13 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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In this segment Dr. Céline Gounder explains that simply adding more hospitals and beds will not halt Ebola transmission. She highlights a cascading testing backlog—described as a “Lucy in the Chocolate Factory” effect—where increasing test demand overwhelms capacity, making timely diagnosis difficult. Beyond testing, she stresses that effective contact tracing is essential but extremely challenging in the region due to a lack of community trust, the presence of multiple actors (government forces, rebel groups, transient miners), ongoing conflict, and rugged, hard‑to‑navigate terrain. These factors together impede the ability to identify and isolate cases, meaning that expanding hospital infrastructure alone cannot control the outbreak.

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It's like Lucy in the Chocolate Factory. The more tests come at you, the more tests come at you, the more backlog you have, and the harder it is to actually get through that. So people are working incredibly hard to be able to get through these tests. And then on top of that, you need contact tracing. And you can't just have open more and more hospitals and more and more beds. You have to work with communities and find out where is the transmission happening, making sure that you are trusted, you're able to trace who has it, who's been exposed. And that's incredibly hard now. We've talked about trust before in this area. You have obviously the government, the rebel groups, you have miners who aren't even from the area, and then all the different conflict. And it's also difficult areas to drive. You might look on the map and say, oh, this is somewhat close, but it's not that easy to get around.