G Ramraj, T Poornima
Ebolowa, capital of Cameroon's South Region (≈ 92, 000 residents; referral hub for ≈ 180, 000), sits on the Cameroon-Gabon-Equatorial Guinea border and has recurrently faced cholera, malaria, Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), and mpox, yet its universal health coverage (UHC) service-coverage index is only 44/100 and physician density is under 2 per 10,000 population. We develop a generic, disease-agnostic SEIR+D framework rather than one fitted to a single pathogen: the baseline parameter set (ℛ0 = 3.00) represents a broadly plausible acute epidemic-prone infection, checked qualitatively-not calibrated-against 2021-2022 cholera surveillance data. Parameters are drawn from the World Health Organization (WHO) and national sources; ℛ0 is derived via the next-generation matrix method; and the resulting ODE system is solved via fourth-order Runge-Kutta integration over an 180-day horizon under three pre-specified intervention scenarios. At baseline, without intervention, infections peak at 14,226 persons (15.5% of the population) on day 119. The attack rate reaches 91.0% (≈ 83, 700 cases), 2,608 people die, and peak bed demand reaches 356% of the 200-bed capacity. A moderate non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI, 40% transmission reduction from day 30) cuts the attack rate to 26.8% but still reaches 98% bed capacity. A strong NPI (70% reduction from day 20) cuts deaths by 99.8% (to ≈ 4) and holds bed utilization below 1%. The ten-day timing advantage over moderate NPI alone saves roughly 538 additional lives. These results indicate that only early, aggressive intervention is compatible with Ebolowa's health-system capacity, and that, given the city's four-decade epidemic history, funded, pre-positioned-rather than reactive mobilization after a signal emerges-is warranted for this cross-border population.