The response to Ebola has been complicated by some of the same challenges now undermining the battle against Covid-19 elsewhere in the world. There have been feuds between government officials, lack of coordination among responding agencies and mistrust from some community members.

As the Ebola outbreak raged on for 19 months, new hot spots kept emerging, health care workers continued to die from the disease and tracking the sick to break transmission chains proved extremely difficult.

To combat Ebola in Congo, one of the world’s poorest nations, health workers are taking a multifaceted approach.

They have worked to win over communities that were sometimes uncooperative — even hostile.

They have drawn on technological innovations, notably a transparent enclosure known as the cube that allows medical workers to reach in and treat patients suffering from the contagious disease through plastic sleeves.

And they have used vaccines, developed relatively recently, which have made it possible to limit the spread of the epidemic.

Ebola, transmitted through contact with sick or dead people or animals, causes fever, bleeding, weakness and abdominal pain. Although it is less contagious than the coronavirus, Ebola kills about half of those it infects — a far higher rate than the coronavirus.

The current Ebola outbreak has infected 3,456 people and killed 2,276, most of them in Congo. It was designated a global health emergency last July, and was the worst Ebola epidemic since the one that began in West Africa in 2014, which ultimately infected 28,616 people and killed more than 11,000.