Rich nations retrieve old plan from a Geneva storage unit as Ebola spreads from DR Congo into Kenya.
Donor nations respond to Kenya's first Ebola case by relaunching their 2014 plan unchanged, retrieved from fourteen boxes in a Geneva storage unit. The virus has been spreading in DR Congo since May. It took an airport to make anyone look up.
The world's richest governments announced on Monday that they will respond to the latest Ebola outbreak by reissuing their 2014 response in full, with the dates changed. The plan was retrieved from a self-storage unit outside Geneva, where it had sat in fourteen cardboard boxes since the West Africa epidemic ended.
The announcement came hours after Kenya confirmed its first ever Ebola death, a traveller who arrived from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Kenyan health officials have traced 28 contacts. The outbreak in DRC's north-east was declared in May. It is the country's seventeenth.
Seventeen. There are West End musicals with shorter runs, and better reviews.
"We considered writing a new plan," said Dr Hartley Pembrook-Vance, director of the International Outbreak Response Secretariat, a coordinating body funded by donor capitals. "Then someone found the old one. It is in very good condition. Most of it was never used."
The boxes were opened on Monday afternoon in a conference room in Geneva. Officials found 2014 press releases with "Guinea" crossed out and "Liberia" written beside it, then crossed out again. A junior aide was handed a biro and told to keep going.
The strain spreading in DRC is Bundibugyo, for which there is no vaccine and no specific treatment. Pembrook-Vance called this "awkward", because the 2014 plan's final chapter assumes a vaccine will turn up and sort things out. "We have left that chapter in," he said. "It gives the document a hopeful ending. People like that."
A sequel nobody asked for
The outbreak had been running for five months before it reached an airport. It is a familiar rhythm. The virus moves through villages, clinics and border towns, and nobody with a budget looks up. Then it boards a flight, and fourteen capitals discover their deep concern at the same moment.
Anyone who was in Freetown in the autumn of 2014 will know the sound. First the silence, then the press conferences.
Ingrid Solvaag speaks for the Group of Fourteen Concerned Capitals, which formed on Monday morning and has yet to agree what it is concerned about. She said the group's first act was to pledge funds. "We have pledged the same amounts as last time," she said. "Some of those pledges were never paid. We feel it would be inconsistent to pay them now."
"Most of it was never used."
Airports across Europe and North America have begun switching their thermal cameras back on. A contractor in Frankfurt confirmed that several had been facing the ceiling since 2016, and had spent the intervening years screening the departures board for fever. None was detected.
"The board is very stable," he said.
Yambuku, 1976
The virus takes its name from a river. The first outbreak was identified at a mission hospital near it, in what was then Zaire. That was half a century ago. The pattern has held ever since: an outbreak, a scramble, a round of lessons learned, and a second round of lessons unlearned in time for the next one.
Pembrook-Vance was asked whether the secretariat had read the lessons-learned report from 2014. "We found it," he said. "It was in box nine, under the lessons-learned report from 2000. Both say the same thing. Both say act early. We have moved them to the front of the plan, where the preface used to be, so that we can be seen to have read them."
Health workers in DRC, who have been treating patients since May without the benefit of a relaunch, were not available for comment. They were working.
Kenya, for its part, is doing what countries do on the first day: tracing contacts, isolating, counting. It is the unglamorous part. It happens whether or not anyone in Geneva finds the right box.
Solvaag was asked what the Group of Fourteen would do if the outbreak reached a European capital. She paused. "We would reissue our 2020 response," she said. "That one is in a different storage unit. We are still looking for the key."
The 2014 plan runs to several hundred pages. The front cover has been replaced. The back cover, which lists the officials who were supposed to sign it off, has not. Several of them have since retired. Their approval is still pending.
The outbreak is not pending. It has never waited for paperwork. That is the one thing about it that has not changed, and the one thing the plan, in any edition, has never managed to account for.
Footnotes.
