Washington is now blocking the very citizens it evacuated to save from flying home. The Trump administration said Monday it will bar Americans currently in the Democratic Republic of Congo from boarding commercial flights to the United States, citing the country’s widening Ebola outbreak.
The order relies on a transportation authority known as Title 49. It places U.S. citizens in Congo, or anyone who has recently left, on a “do-not-board” list until they have spent at least 21 days in a third country, a White House official told Reuters. Two dozen Americans were set to board flights out of Congo on Tuesday when the restriction took effect; the State Department says it will support them, and others affected, through the waiting period.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. signed the underlying order earlier Monday, citing the virus’s spread to within hours of Kinshasa, Congo’s capital. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday that a U.S. citizen working for a humanitarian organization in Congo had tested positive for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola. One American was admitted to Frankfurt University Hospital in Germany early Monday. A second, identified by the Serge Christian mission organization as Dr. Peter Stafford, had already been flown to Germany for treatment in May, the CDC said.
Congo’s own case count tells the same story from the other direction. There are 1,926 confirmed cases nationwide, including 702 deaths, according to official figures released late Sunday, a toll that has climbed steadily since the country’s 17th Ebola outbreak was confirmed in mid-May.
Nine time zones away from the White House order, in the northeastern province of Ituri, the strain is showing up as a labor dispute. Dozens of workers at the Ebola treatment center in Rwampara (epidemiologists, case investigators, drivers, gravediggers) walked off the job Monday and shut the hospital down, blocking the access road and burning a tire outside, according to the Associated Press. They say Congolese authorities have not paid them in two months.
“We don’t know how it is possible to not have been paid for two months. We don’t want to give up the job.”
Bahati Claude, health worker, Rwampara General Hospital
Congo’s health minister, Roger Kamba, visited Ituri last week and acknowledged the payroll had been corrupted by names that don’t belong there. We must ensure that these payments reach the right people. We have faced a few challenges, notably changes to the lists, which have led to complaints from people saying they are not being paid even though they are working. We have the means to sort this out,
he said.
The outbreak itself is an unusually stubborn one. It is caused by the rare Bundibugyo virus, a variant with no approved vaccine or treatment, and it went undetected for weeks last spring in part because early tests screened for a more common Ebola strain. Kamba said last week the virus had reached two additional provinces. Meanwhile, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus posted Monday that a second American, a humanitarian worker in eastern Congo, had been transferred to Germany for care, a reminder that the outbreak’s reach now extends well past the people originally exposed in Ituri.
What connects a Washington travel order to a burning tire outside a rural Congolese hospital is the same failure, viewed from opposite ends. One government is trying to keep the virus from crossing an ocean by grounding its own nationals for three weeks at a stretch. The other is trying to keep its own outbreak-response workforce from walking away entirely, because gravediggers and epidemiologists cannot be expected to keep showing up unpaid indefinitely. Both measures are reactive, not preventive — and both are evidence that five months in, the response is still chasing the virus rather than getting ahead of it.
For the two dozen Americans who missed Tuesday’s flights, the wait is now three weeks in a third country. For the workers at Rwampara, it’s back pay Kamba says is coming, whenever the list gets sorted out. Neither timeline is in their own hands.
Related: a U.S. citizen’s positive Ebola test first drew CDC intervention earlier this month, and the outbreak’s spread to a new DRC province pushed the death toll past 600 just days before Monday’s developments.
