Fred Balongo, a teacher and farmer from the Ugandan village of Madudu in the Mubende district, came dangerously close to contracting Ebola earlier this fall (2022). Balongo and the rest of his family were ordered to quarantine for 21 days after his son’s friend and neighbor tested positive for Ebola.

While everyone in Balongo’s immediate family survived, their neighbors did not. The illness k!lled the 14-year-old son and his mother within weeks.

“That is the challenge we are going through now,” Balongo told DW. “They were my neighbors, like 100 meters from my home.”

Madudu, a community of around 480 families, is located 150 kilometers (93 miles) from Uganda’s capital, Kampala. It has emerged as an Ebola hotspot, having observed the country’s first case in the current outbreak in September. Cases of the fatal virus have been found in eight districts across the country in the last month, including Kampala.

At the time of writing, official government numbers show that at least 51 individuals had d!ed and 132 had been infected.

The Sudan virus causes the variant of Ebola that is sweeping Uganda, with a fatality rate ranging from 41 to 100 percent. According to the World Health Organization, the Sudan virus was last found in Uganda in 2012, before to the recent Ebola outbreak.

The Ugandan Ministry of Health, which is in charge of coordinating the outbreak’s response, has issued bleak forecasts for the next six months. Its authorities anticipate 1,200 cases and 500 deaths by late April 2023. According to a government study obtained by the Telegraph newspaper in the United Kingdom. According to the leaked assessment, there was widespread mishandling of the situation, a paucity of healthcare personnel on the ground, and a lack of sufficient personal protective equipment (PPE) for physicians in clinics.

“We did see a very worrying trend of case numbers going up over the last three weeks,” said Sam Taylor, a Medecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) representative in Uganda. “This last week, the case numbers have been less than the previous week, but [it’s] not necessarily a small number.”

According to ministry forecasts, this epidemic would be the third biggest since Ebola was first diagnosed in 1976, according to Taylor. He talked with DW from Uganda’s capital, saying that life was going on as usual, “which from our perspective is slightly worrying because we do have cases that we’ve identified [in Kampala].”

However, lockdowns have been announced in other areas. Late last month, the inhabitants of the country’s Mubende and Kassanda districts went under a 21-day lockdown imposed by the government in an attempt to limit the spread of cases.

“It is very tiresome,” Balongo observed, reflecting on his own confinement. “You don’t eat. You are just thinking about what is happening tomorrow.”

According to Balongo, commerce in Madudu has come to a halt, and some people are going hungry. The tiredness described by Balongo is understandable: Ugandan schools were shuttered for two years during the COVID-19 epidemic, the world’s longest pandemic-related school shutdown.

According to Julius Mugambwa, a DW correspondent on the ground, the ensuing exhaustion may be generating complacency among the community.

“Many people seem unbothered by the spreading Ebola,” Mugambwa remarked. “Emerging out of the COVID-19 pandemic, many have the attitude that if we survived COVID, we can survive Ebola.”