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Congo's Ebola deaths pass 2,000 as the WHO finds the outbreak began months before it was declared The deadliest chapter yet of Congo's Ebola outbreak arrived with a correction to its own history. On 11 August the health ministry said more than 2,000 people have died in what is now the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record — and a WHO investigation concluded the epidemic had been spreading for months before it was officially declared, meaning the response has been chasing a fire that started earlier than anyone admitted. The week showed both faces of the fight. A river boat quarantined near Kinshasa after five deaths — 200 passengers monitored after a traveler died with Ebola-like symptoms — ultimately tested negative, the surveillance system working as designed. Meanwhile a study found the related Congo-Uganda outbreak likely began with a separate, new animal-to-human transmission event: the virus is not one fire but a landscape that keeps throwing sparks. The gap between when an epidemic begins and when authority names it is measured, in the end, in the count. Analogies The Plague of Athens Not many days after their arrival in Attica the plague first began to show itself among the Athenians. It was said that it had broken out in many places previously in the neighbourhood of Lemnos and elsewhere; but a pestilence of such extent and mortality was nowhere remembered. Neither were the physicians at first of any service, ignorant as they were of the proper way to treat it, but they died themselves the most thickly, as they visited the sick most often; nor did any human art succeed any better.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book II, trans. Richard Crawley (c. 400 BC) → The Broad Street Pump The most terrible outbreak of cholera which ever occurred in this kingdom, is probably that which took place in Broad Street, Golden Square, and the adjoining streets, a few weeks ago. Within two hundred and fifty yards of the spot where Cambridge Street joins Broad Street, there were upwards of five hundred fatal attacks of cholera in ten days. The mortality in this limited area probably equals any that was ever caused in this country, even by the plague; and it was much more sudden, as the greater number of cases terminated in a few hours.
John Snow, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, 2nd ed. (1855) → The Bills of Mortality The next bill was from the 23rd of May to the 30th, when the number of the plague was seventeen. But the burials in St Giles’s were fifty-three—a frightful number!—of whom they set down but nine of the plague; but on an examination more strictly by the justices of peace, and at the Lord Mayor’s request, it was found there were twenty more who were really dead of the plague in that parish, but had been set down of the spotted-fever or other distempers, besides others concealed.
Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) → The Word for It Rats die by the thousands in the streets of Oran, then people begin to die, and still the prefecture hesitates: committees convene, officials quibble over terminology, and small official notices are posted in the quietest corners of town. Dr. Rieux keeps insisting that whether they call it plague or fever, half the city could die while they argue over the name. Only when the death counts can no longer be softened does the telegram finally come, and the gates close.
Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (1947) → The Triumph of Death An army of skeletons herds the living toward a coffin-lidded trap across a landscape already burning to the horizon. Bruegel spares no rank: a king in armor, a cardinal, lovers with a lute all go into the same dark press while skeletons toll the bells overhead. Painted between plague seasons, it is the flattest census imaginable — no one miscounted, no one exempt.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1562, Museo del Prado, Madrid → Miserere mei, Deus A setting of Psalm 51, the great penitential plea for mercy, sung in the Sistine Chapel during Holy Week as the candles were put out one by one. For over a century the Vatican forbade copying the score on pain of excommunication, keeping the music as guarded knowledge inside its own walls — until a fourteen-year-old Mozart heard it twice in 1770 and wrote it out from memory. Institutions can embargo the score; the sound gets out anyway.
Gregorio Allegri, c. 1638, Sistine Chapel → 
