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The latest Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo was announced on February 7, 2021, beginning with a patient who presented symptoms on February 1 and died on February 3. In total, 13 cases and 5 deaths were reported from the North Kivu province, with the most recent case being reported on March 16. On May 3, the DRC declared the end of the outbreak.

In an effort to increase our understanding of the 2018-2020 Ebola virus (EBOV) epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), we compiled epidemiological data collected by the World Health Organization (WHO).

We accumulated patient data from situation reports released by the WHO each week, which provide the cumulative number of Ebola patients from the beginning of the outbreak. The data presented in the situation reports is classified by event type (confirmed or probable cases, total or confirmed deaths) and health zone in the Ituri, North Kivu and South Kivu districts of the DRC. A PDF to Excel converter was used to efficiently extract the tables from the situation reports, and the data was collected by week and sorted by geographic location. Because the number of cases was reported as a cumulative number, spanning from the beginning of the outbreak to the week that the report was released, the cumulative number of cases for one week was subtracted by the cumulative number of cases for the previous week to obtain the weekly number of new cases.

The 2018-2020 Ebola epidemic is now over, and all situation reports have been released. Currently, the data available reflects reports released from August 7, 2018 to June 23, 2020, which exhibit data collected on August 5, 2018 to June 21, 2020. Reports released before July 23, 2019 can be found (here) and all reports can be found (here), specifying "Ebola virus disease" as Health Topic and "Situation report" for Publication Type. Over the whole epidemic, 3317 confirmed and 153 probable cases as well as 2287 deaths -including 2134 deaths among confirmed cases- were reported across 29 health zones in the DRC.

Disclaimer. Please note that this data is still based on work in progress and should be considered preliminary. If you intend to include any of these data in publications, please let us know – otherwise please feel free to download and use without restrictions. We have shared this data with the hope that people will download and use it, as well as scrutinize it so we can improve our methods and analyses. Please contact us if you have any questions or comments – we’ll buy beers for #ResearchParasites that spot flaws and faults in the data and come up with improvements!

Andersen Lab
The Scripps Research Institute
La Jolla, CA, USA
[email protected]