The UN World Health Organization (WHO) says it appears that the West African Ebola Outbreak has been “vastly underestimated”, and that the official death toll might be much greater than the 1,069 lives officially believed to be lost out of 1,975.

“Staff at the outbreak sites see evidence that the numbers of reported cases and deaths vastly underestimate the magnitude of the outbreak,” the WHO said in a statement.  “WHO is coordinating a massive scaling up of the international response, marshalling support from individual countries, disease control agencies, agencies within the United Nations system, and others.”

These echo the concerns of aid workers who have return to their home countries from West Africa, reporting an Ebola Outbreak that’s worse than it appears.  Last week, Ken Isaacs of the American religious charity Samaritan’s Purse told the US Congress that the WHO only knows about “25 to 50 percent of what is happening”, hinting at a death toll way above 2,000.

The majority of cases were in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, while four people have died in Nigeria.  But these countries were woefully unprepared to death with Ebola, which had never appeared in West Africa before.  Health systems and official responses were overwhelmed by the rapidly advancing death toll and contagious nature of Ebola, which is spread by bodily fluids.  The majority of medical units are in the cities, and what’s happening in the boondocks is anyone’s guess.

International aid agencies are looking into ways to make emergency airdrops of food and supplies, or run truck convoys, to areas of Sierra Leone and Liberia that are cordoned off because of quarantines to halt the spread of the virus.