NIGHTMARE SCENARIO
Worst virus fears realised in poor or war-torn countries
For months, experts have warned of a potential nightmare scenario: After overwhelming health systems in some of the world’s wealthiest regions, the coronavirus gains a foothold in poor or war-torn countries ill-equipped to contain it and sweeps through the population.
Now some of those fears are being realised.
In southern Yemen, health workers are leaving their posts en masse because of a lack of protective equipment, and some hospitals are turning away patients struggling to breathe. In Sudan’s war-ravaged Darfur region, where there is little testing, a mysterious illness resembling Covid-19 is spreading through camps for the internally displaced.
Cases are soaring in India and Pakistan, together home to more than 1.5 billion people and where authorities say nationwide lockdowns are no longer an option because of high poverty.
In Latin America, Brazil has a confirmed caseload and death count second only to the United States, and its leader refuses to take steps to stem the spread of the virus. Alarming escalations are unfolding in Peru, Chile, Ecuador and Panama, even after they imposed early lockdowns.
The first reports of disarray are also emerging from hospitals in South Africa, which has its continent’s most developed economy. Sick
patients are lying on beds in corridors as one hospital runs out of space. At another, an emergency morgue was needed to hold more than 700 bodies.
“We are reaping the whirlwind now,” said Francois Venter, a South African health expert at the University of Witswatersrand in Johannesburg.
Worldwide, there are 10.1 million confirmed cases and more than 502,000 reported deaths, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. Experts say both those numbers undercount the true toll of the pandemic, due to limited testing and missed mild cases.
South Africa has more than a third of Africa’s confirmed cases of Covid-19 with 138,000. It’s ahead of other African countries in the pandemic timeline and approaching its peak. So far its facilities have managed to cope, but if they become overwhelmed, it will be a grim forewarning because South Africa’s health system is reputed to be the continent’s best.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, poor and conflict-ravaged countries have been at a major disadvantage. The global scramble for protective equipment sent prices soaring. Testing kits have also been hard to come by. Tracking and quarantining patients requires large numbers of health workers.
“It’s all a domino effect,” said Kate White, head of emergencies for Doctors Without Borders. “Whenever you have countries that are economically not as well off as others, then they will be adversely affected.”
Global health experts say testing is key, but months into the pandemic, few developing countries can carry out the tens of thousands of tests every week needed to detect and contain outbreaks.
Lockdowns are likely the most effective safeguard, but they have exacted a heavy toll even on middle-class families in Europe and
North America, and are devastating in developing countries.
Poverty has also accelerated the pandemic in Latin America, where millions with informal jobs had to go out and keep working, and then returned to crowded homes where they spread the virus to relatives.
Peru’s strict three-month lockdown failed to contain its outbreak, and it now has the world’s sixth-highest number of cases in a population of 32 million. Intensive care units are nearly 88 per cent occupied and the virus shows no sign of slowing.
“Hospitals are on the verge of collapse,” said Ciro Maguin˜a, an epidemiologist at Cayetano Heredia University in Lima.
Aid groups faced their own struggles. Doctors Without Borders says the price it pays for masks went up threefold at one point and is still higher than normal. The group also faces obstacles in transporting medical supplies to remote areas as international and domestic flights have been drastically reduced.
The pandemic has caused global hunger to rise to record numbers, the World Food Programme warned yesterday. The number of hungry people in the 83 countries where it operates could increase to 270 million before the end of 2020 — an 82 per cent increase from before Covid-19 took hold, it said.
Mired in civil war for the past five years, Yemen was already home to the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Now the Houthi rebels are suppressing all information about an outbreak in the north, and the health system in the governmentcontrolled south is collapsing.
“Coronavirus has invaded our homes, our cities, our countryside,” said Dr Abdul Rahman al-Azraqi, an internal medicine specialist and former hospital director in the city of Taiz. He estimates that 90 per cent of Yemeni patients die at home.
“Our hospital doesn’t have any doctors, only a few nurses and administrators. There is effectively no medical treatment.”