KINSHASA, Sept. 17 (Xinhua) -- The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is showing a shifting pattern, with transmission easing in the long-time epicenter of Ituri but rising rapidly in North Kivu, where treatment capacity is nearing saturation, according to the latest government situation report released on Thursday.
As of Tuesday, the country had reported 7,404 confirmed cases, including 3,577 deaths, with an overall case fatality rate of 48.3 percent. A total of 1776 patients have recovered. The outbreak has affected 62 health zones across seven provinces, with Ituri remaining the epicenter of the outbreak, accounting for 77.7 percent of all confirmed cases.
The report pointed to particularly acute pressure on treatment capacity in North Kivu, where 373 patients were hospitalized and the overall bed occupancy rate had reached 94.7 percent.
Jean-Jacques Muyembe, head of the country's National Institute of Biomedical Research, said Tuesday in Kinshasa that Ituri had passed a "peak" and entered a "downward slope," while the epidemic curve in North Kivu was still rising and "has not yet reached the plateau," making it another major hotspot.
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Wednesday that the response was beginning to show encouraging signs in some of the worst-affected areas, particularly Ituri.
He nevertheless warned that the epidemic continued to expand and claim lives. In North Kivu, weekly cases had almost doubled over the previous two weeks, rising from about 100 to more than 200.
"The area is so vast that it is hard to speak of a single epidemic. It is many outbreaks, in many places," Tedros told a press briefing in Geneva.
The current outbreak has become the largest and deadliest Ebola epidemic in the DRC's history and the second-largest globally, after the 2014-2016 epidemic in West Africa. ■