Dr. Céline Gounder explains why Ebola spreads so fast in recent outbreaks: a dead man was dressed and put on a bus to reach his burial site, traveling hours across paved roads and stopping at multiple clinics with inadequate protective equipment. Infrastructure and cultural practices make containment nearly impossible.
Chapters
When I saw that there were cases separated by hundreds of kilometers, my first thought was like, holy shit, do you know how long it takes to go hundreds of kilometers in Eastern Kivu? Like days and days and days, right? With Guinea, from Gakédou to Conakry, there was a road that would take you directly to Kisidougou, and it was paved. It was like an hour and a half. That same ride would have taken you a day in Eastern Congo. The fact that you not only have so many cases and that they seem to be hundreds of kilometers apart, many hundred kilometers in a place like that, that's a really, really bad sign. I remember hearing a case of, um, a family, this guy who died, and they straight up weakened that Bernie Sim, dressed him up, had the whole business, put him on a bus and drove him across the country, right? Because you need to be buried in your homeland, your ancestral homeland. If you don't They're going to come back and they're going to haunt you. And so I'm thinking about that, right? And like all the different places that these folks who were sick in this outbreak now in Eastern Congo and in Uganda, all the places where they likely stopped, maybe got care at a clinic, assuming that, you know, proper PPE was obviously not used. The amount of stuff that we learned in such a short period of time today means that this just can't be good at this point.
