One month after the Ebola outbreak was officially declared in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the virus is still spreading, and the World Health Organization says the real scope of the crisis remains unknown because health workers cannot keep up with contact tracing.
Confirmed cases surged past 800 between Monday and Tuesday, an increase of roughly 300 in a single week. About 3,000 people who came into contact with confirmed cases remain unaccounted for. And in Ituri province, the outbreak's epicenter, Congolese security forces fired warning shots to disperse a crowd trying to take the body of an Ebola victim home, a body that health workers were attempting to remove because even in death, victims are highly contagious.
That is the picture emerging from eastern Congo and neighboring Uganda, where border controls exist on paper but not in practice, and where a nearly 500-mile frontier, about the length of the state of Florida, makes containment something closer to wishful thinking than public health strategy.
The WHO warned that the virus was still "increasing" in its "geographic spread" and that "intense community transmission continues" across the Central African region. CBS News reported from Uganda, interviewing key officials on both the WHO and Ugandan sides of the response.
WHO Incident Manager Dr. Marie-Roseline Belizaire told CBS News that deaths were still being reported by communities in Congo, deaths that never made it into official case counts.
"That means we are missing cases. One month after the outbreak has been declared, I'm still feeling concerned."
That admission alone should focus minds. A month into a declared outbreak, the international body tasked with coordinating the response cannot say with confidence how many people are infected or dying. Congolese health workers told CBS News they had managed to follow up with only a little over half of the people who came into contact with confirmed cases.
The math is grim. If roughly 3,000 possible contacts are still unaccounted for, the official case count of over 800 may be a significant undercount. And with the outbreak hitting record daily spikes, the gap between what officials know and what is actually happening on the ground keeps widening.
The scene in Ituri province captures the challenge in miniature. Health workers arrived to remove the body of an Ebola victim, standard protocol, given the extreme contagion risk from corpses. A crowd gathered, angry, intent on taking the body home for burial. Congolese security forces fired warning shots to break up the confrontation.
No injuries, arrests, or property damage were reported. But the incident illustrates a dynamic that has plagued Ebola responses across Central Africa for years: communities that distrust outside health workers, resist body-removal protocols, and sometimes turn hostile. When public health depends on compliance and the population is not complying, contact tracing and safe burial become nearly impossible.
The death toll crossed 100 in under a month amid armed conflict and local resistance that have crippled the broader response effort. The combination of insecurity, community pushback, and weak health infrastructure is a formula for exactly the kind of uncontrolled spread the WHO is now describing.
Across the border, Uganda is trying to hold the line. As of June 10, the WHO said at least 19 Ebola cases had been confirmed in Uganda, including two deaths. The Congo-Uganda border was officially closed. At Uganda's main airport, CBS News team members were required to scan a QR code and declare that nobody in their party had been in contact with bats, attended a funeral, or experienced Ebola symptoms such as fever or vomiting.
Ugandan authorities were described as operating in "proactive protection mode." No new Ebola cases had been reported in Uganda in 11 days. Uganda's National Director of Public Health, Dr. Daniel Kyabayinze, told CBS News this week that he and other top epidemiologists were generally satisfied with Uganda's preventative measures.
But Dr. Kyabayinze was blunt about the limits of what Uganda can do on its own.
"Our problem is how is it being managed across the border with the Congo. We know all our cases have been imported from there."
He described cross-border movement as functionally unstoppable. The communities on either side of the frontier share language, culture, and family ties. Unofficial crossing points remain active regardless of official closure orders.
"We are the same people. The culture and language in Uganda and the people across the Congo are the same. They're the same families. So, even when you have non-gazetted (unofficial) crossing points, the families still communicate."
Dr. Kyabayinze went further, calling the border essentially unenforceable.
"Putting a tight ribbon, or a no-stop movement on the porous borders is almost impossible, it's like stopping wind from blowing."
That candor is useful. It is also an indictment. If the border cannot be sealed, and if every confirmed Ugandan case was imported from Congo, then Uganda's fate depends entirely on whether Congo can get its own outbreak under control. And right now, Congo cannot.
The pattern here is not new. A deadly pathogen emerges in a region with limited health infrastructure, armed conflict, and deep community distrust of outside intervention. International organizations issue warnings. Case counts climb. Contact tracing falls behind. And border controls prove inadequate against populations that share family, language, and daily life across political lines drawn on a map.
The WHO declared this outbreak a global health emergency, a designation meant to trigger international resources and attention. Yet a month in, the WHO's own incident manager says she is "still feeling concerned" and acknowledges that the true case count remains unknown.
What exactly has the global health emergency declaration produced? The case count jumped by 300 in a week. Health workers can track only about half their contacts. Security forces are firing warning shots to enforce body-removal protocols. And the border between the two most affected countries is, in the words of Uganda's own public health director, as porous as the wind.
Experts have warned the outbreak risks spiraling beyond control, with frontline doctors sounding alarms about the trajectory. The confirmed case count of over 800 represents only what officials have managed to document. The real number, by the WHO's own admission, is higher.
A photo dated June 13, 2026, showed the body of an Ebola victim being taken to the morgue of Nyankunde Medical Center in Bunia by health workers. It is one image from one day in one city. The outbreak stretches across Ituri province and into Uganda, with fears now reaching as far as Brazil and Italy.
Dr. Kyabayinze said movement across the border under restrictions was likely "very minimal," but he could not rule it out. That hedge tells you everything. Officials know the border is porous. They know the cases in Uganda came from Congo. They know families on both sides stay in contact regardless of official closures. And they know the contact-tracing effort in Congo is falling short by thousands of people.
None of this is a surprise. It is a failure of execution dressed up in the language of concern. The WHO warns. Officials express worry. Case counts climb. And the people living in the path of the virus, in Ituri province, in border communities, in Ugandan towns, bear the consequences of institutional inability to match words with results.
When the world's premier global health body says "we are missing cases" a full month into a declared emergency, that is not a warning. It is a confession.
