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The United States will ensure that the Democratic Republic of Congo’s team are able to travel to play in the World Cup, making an exemption to an entry ban over Ebola, a US official said Tuesday.
“We expect the DRC team to be able to attend the World Cup,” a senior State Department official said on condition of anonymity.
The United States has banned non-Americans who have been in the DRC, Uganda or South Sudan in the previous 21 days from visiting due to the deadly outbreak of Ebola.
The US official said the DR Congo team, the only one among the three countries to have qualified for soccer’s premier event, had already been training in Europe so may not have been subject to the ban in any case.
But if they in fact were in DR Congo over the last 21 days, they would be subject to strict screening of the sort required for returning American citizens — not a complete ban.
Read Also: DR Congo Ebola Crisis Now A WHO International Emergency
“We’re working to get them into the same protocol for testing in isolation that American citizens returning and permanent residents would be,” the official said.
The official said that the exemption would not apply to ordinary fans from DR Congo looking to come to cheer on the team.
DR Congo have qualified for only the second time for the World Cup after playing in 1974, when the country was known as Zaire.
The DR Congo “Leopards” plan to maintain a base in Houston, where they will play their first match on June 17 against Portugal as part of Group K.
The team is scheduled to head to Guadalajara to play Colombia on June 24 before returning to the United States to play Uzbekistan in Atlanta on June 28.
The World Health Organization has declared a public health emergency of international concern over an Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo — its highest alert level, triggered after the Bundibugyo strain of the virus moved beyond its origin point in Ituri province, crossed into Uganda and turned up in Kinshasa, DRC’s capital, thousands of kilometers from where the outbreak began.
Around 246 suspected cases and 80 deaths have been recorded so far. Eight have been laboratory confirmed. But WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was frank about the gap between those figures and reality, warning of “significant uncertainties to the true number of infected persons and geographic spread.” The outbreak, in other words, is almost certainly bigger than what health systems are currently able to see.
What separates this crisis from previous Ebola emergencies is the strain involved.
The Bundibugyo virus has no approved vaccine and no approved treatment — the medical tools that helped contain earlier outbreaks simply do not exist for this one. Historical data puts its case fatality rate at around 30 percent.
Uganda confirmed two cases, including the death of a 59-year-old Congolese man whose body was subsequently returned home. A confirmed case also emerged in Goma, the eastern city currently under M23 rebel control. The confirmed Kinshasa case — believed to involve a patient who had traveled from Ituri — is the data point that sharpens the urgency most. When a pathogen with no available vaccine reaches a capital city of nearly 17 million people, the containment calculation changes entirely.
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Africa CDC Director-General Jean Kaseya flagged funeral practices as a specific transmission risk requiring immediate public messaging. Community burial customs — where family members wash and prepare bodies — drove significant spread during the 2014-2016 West Africa outbreak that eventually killed more than 11,000 people. “We don’t want people infected because of funerals,” Kaseya said.
Six American citizens have reportedly been exposed to the virus in DRC, with one showing symptoms, though no infections have been confirmed.
The US government was working to evacuate the group, with a military facility in Germany cited as a possible destination. The CDC announced it was deploying additional staff to both DRC and Uganda.
