As I understand it, Uige has a population of 500,000.
Additionally, many of the back roads of Angola are mined, making contact tracing, if the populace were not hostile, extremely dangerous.
So no one knows how many cases there are, actually. Some estimates I have read are double the known cases, but I think it is far higher than that. No one is telling people to flee--they are doing it on their own.
No one knows how many cases there are...
Mobile surveillance operations in Uige have ceased because of damage to vehicles and threats of violence. It is unclear if health care workers have been killed because of the unrest, but clearly contact tracing has been limited in the Uige, which is the epicenter of the outbreak.
Therefore management by contact tracing and quarantine will be difficult. The lack of survivors has also led to relatives hiding sick patients because no one has come out of the hospital alive. However, care by untrained and unprotected relatives leads to further transmission. This transmission has now reached Luanda, Angola's capital.
The 3 million residents of Luanda will get increasingly concerned as the virus spreads in Luanda and the number dead increase. The lack of any survivors creates more suspicion about the motives of health care workers and those trying to monitor and quarantine contacts of infected patients.