By Mike Stobbe — Associated PressJune 5, 2026 NEW YORK — The Ebola outbreak in Central Africa could grow to 20,000 cases or more, depending on how quickly infected people are isolated to slow the spread, according to a new analysis by U.S. health officials.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a range of scenarios generated by computer models Friday, spanning from 10,000 cases to more than 20,000. If accurate, a worst-case scenario could approach the worst Ebola outbreak in history, the West Africa epidemic in 2014-2016 — which resulted in more than 28,000 reported cases and more than 11,000 deaths.
“Without strong public health interventions, the modeling work suggests an outbreak of that scale is possible,” said Satish Pillai, incident manager for the CDC’s Ebola response, in a briefing with reporters.
Jennifer Nuzzo, director of Brown University’s Pandemic Center, said the modeling “affirms what we have worried about since the beginning: This outbreak is following dangerous trajectory” if more is not done to stop the spread of Ebola.
But she cautioned it can be extremely difficult to predict how outbreaks will progress. “I wouldn’t read too much into the specific numbers. It’s really hard to make an accurate projection when you have limited data,” she added.
