The STAT opinion by Stark and Seff correctly flags five mechanisms— income loss, movement restrictions, school/clinic closures, fear-based control, and health-system mistrust—drawn from their systematic review of 112 studies on violence during outbreaks. That review, observational in design and lacking RCTs, aggregates mostly cross-sectional and qualitative data across heterogeneous settings, with no reported conflicts beyond academic affiliations at Washington University. Yet the piece underplays quantitative effect sizes and the compounding role of active armed conflict in eastern DRC, where prior Ebola waves (2018–2020) already showed 1.5–2-fold rises in intimate-partner violence in observational cohorts. Cross-referencing with a 2021 Lancet Global Health analysis of COVID-19 mobility restrictions (n=~40 countries, observational) and a 2023 PLOS Medicine synthesis of Ebola-era data from Sierra Leone reveals that digital hotlines reach at most 30 % of at-risk women lacking phones or literacy, a coverage failure the STAT authors note but do not quantify against baseline service utilization. The absence of Bundibugyo-specific vaccines extends restriction periods, amplifying every pathway; USAID cuts remove the very GBV case-management overlays that mitigated harm in 2018–2020. Standard coverage focuses on case counts; the deeper pattern is that infectious-disease responses repeatedly externalize social costs onto women and girls unless violence indicators are embedded in surveillance from day one.