Why HR and Benefits Leaders Need to Start Thinking About Ebola Now
For most human resources executives and employee benefits professionals, emergency planning tends to revolve around the familiar — hurricanes, wildfires, flu season, or the lingering memory of the COVID-19 pandemic. But a growing chorus of global health experts is urging a new addition to that list: Ebola. And the message is coming from a credible, high-profile source. Dr. Lorna Friedman, global health leader for the multinational client segment at Mercer, is calling on HR leaders and benefits advisors across the United States to pay serious attention to the current Ebola outbreak — even if their organizations don't have a single employee on the African continent.
The Warning From Mercer's Global Health Expert
Dr. Friedman routinely works with some of the world's largest and most geographically dispersed employers — organizations with offices in Chicago, London, Taipei, and dozens of other cities around the globe. Her clients include executives who log more frequent-flyer miles in a month than most people accumulate in a lifetime. That footprint gives her a unique vantage point on how rapidly health emergencies can ripple across borders and disrupt workforce operations.
But Friedman's advice isn't exclusively for multinational giants. In a recent interview, she made clear that any U.S. employer engaged in long-range strategic planning should be factoring Ebola into their risk models right now.
"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of chaos," Friedman said — a maxim that carries particular weight when you consider how quickly the current outbreak is evolving.
Understanding the Current Ebola Outbreak: What the Data Shows
To appreciate why Mercer is sounding the alarm, it helps to understand what makes the present situation different from past Ebola episodes. The COVID-19 pandemic, which dominated global headlines and disrupted businesses worldwide, effectively wound down around 2023. Even in its most dangerous early phases, COVID-19 presented a case fatality rate well below 1% for many healthy, working-age adults.
Ebola is a different kind of threat entirely. Even during outbreaks where healthcare workers had limited information and inadequate treatment options, the virus still killed fewer than 1 in 1,000 otherwise healthy infected individuals in some historical contexts. The current strain, however, is far more alarming.
The Bundibugyo type of Ebola virus now circulating in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda has demonstrated a case fatality rate exceeding 20% among confirmed infections. To put that in stark perspective: more than one in five people known to be infected with this strain has died. As of June 7, the outbreak had produced 569 confirmed infections and 120 confirmed deaths — numbers that are climbing, not stabilizing.
Compounding the danger is a serious breakdown in community trust. Angry community members have reportedly removed individuals believed to be infected from healthcare facilities, potentially reintegrating them into the general population. This kind of disruption to containment protocols dramatically accelerates the spread of a virus that is already difficult to control.
CDC Projections Paint a Sobering Picture
Perhaps the most urgent data point for HR and benefits leaders comes directly from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Public health specialists at the CDC have modeled the trajectory of the current outbreak under different containment scenarios, and the results are sobering.
- If communities continue to struggle with isolating infected individuals at the current rate, there is a 65% probability that total confirmed cases could surpass 20,000 within just three months.
- Conversely, if communities are able to place approximately 70% of confirmed patients in proper isolation, the probability that cases will exceed 10,000 drops to just 5%.
Those two scenarios represent vastly different risk environments for multinational employers, business travelers, and even domestic companies that rely on global supply chains. The gap between a contained outbreak and an uncontrolled one is measured not in years but in weeks — which is precisely why Friedman and Mercer are urging proactive planning now, rather than reactive scrambling later.
What Proactive Ebola Planning Looks Like for HR Teams
So what does meaningful preparation actually look like for benefits managers and HR executives who want to get ahead of this risk? While specific protocols will vary by organization size and geographic exposure, there are several foundational steps that virtually every employer can take.
Review and Update Business Travel Policies
Organizations with employees who travel internationally — or who may be dispatched to affected regions — should review existing travel health policies immediately. This means identifying which employees regularly travel to or through Central and East Africa, ensuring they have access to up-to-date health advisories, and establishing clear protocols for what happens if a traveler is exposed or becomes symptomatic while abroad.
Audit Your Employee Benefits Packages for Infectious Disease Coverage
Benefits leaders should audit current health insurance and emergency medical evacuation coverage to confirm that policies adequately address infectious disease scenarios, including coverage for overseas hospitalization, repatriation, and quarantine-related costs. Gaps in coverage that seemed hypothetical two years ago are now a tangible liability.
Develop or Refresh an Infectious Disease Response Plan
Any organization that developed a COVID-19 response plan has a useful template to build from. That plan should be reviewed, updated, and stress-tested against an Ebola scenario — which differs from COVID-19 in transmission dynamics, mortality risk, and the public fear response it is likely to provoke among employees and their families.
Communicate Transparently With Your Workforce
Employee anxiety around infectious disease outbreaks can be as operationally disruptive as the disease itself. HR leaders should prepare clear, factual communication strategies that keep employees informed without triggering unnecessary panic. Partnering with occupational health professionals or external advisors like those at Mercer can help ensure that messaging is both accurate and appropriately calibrated.
The Bottom Line: Prevention Over Reaction
The lesson of the COVID-19 pandemic was learned painfully by HR and benefits teams around the world: organizations that planned ahead fared better than those that scrambled to respond. Dr. Friedman's message on Ebola is an extension of that lesson. The data from the CDC, combined with the containment challenges on the ground in the DRC and Uganda, suggests that the window for proactive planning is open right now — but it may not stay open for long.
Benefits advisors and HR leaders who treat Ebola as a distant, someone-else's-problem risk do so at the peril of their organizations and their employees. Those who heed Mercer's guidance and build preparedness into their planning today are the ones who will be best positioned to protect their people — and their businesses — if the outbreak escalates further in the months ahead.