Spike in Darfur deaths points to invisible spread of coronavirus
In the sprawling camps for the displaced of Darfur, the war-scarred western region of Sudan, officials say the elderly are falling sick and dying at astonishing rates.
In North Darfur’s provincial capital of El Fasher, some say they scroll through a dozen death announcements each day: Another old friend, relative, community leader lost with dizzying speed.
Doctors in the region’s few functioning hospitals report an influx of patients with symptoms like a lost sense of taste, breathing troubles and fevers. The official causes of their untimely deaths remain “unknown”.
Humanitarian workers and medical personnel believe the coronavirus is spreading unchecked and untracked through Sudan’s most marginalised territory, where medical facilities are few and far between and where years of conflict have left 1.6 million people crammed into camps.
Nationwide, Sudan has reported 6879 coronavirus infections and 433 deaths, according to the Health Ministry. Of those, 193 cases and 54 fatalities have been confirmed across Darfur — a figure experts believe is a vast undercount.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, public health officials have sounded the alarm that the coronavirus will take a disastrous toll on the world’s most vulnerable regions, particularly camps for the internally displaced and refugees, where social distancing, even handwashing, prove impossible.
“People in the camps are suffocating, they can’t breathe,” said Mohamed Hassan Adam, director of Abushouk camp for the internally displaced in North Darfur. Just a corner of the camp saw 64 unexplained deaths in one month, he said. His four neighbours, all in their sixties, grew feeble and vanished one by one. “They get exhausted then they die. There is no way to tell what happened.”
Authorities are scrambling to curb the spread of contagion amid a fragile democratic transition after massive protests last year toppled longtime autocrat Omar al-Bashir.
Sudan’s health care system is in disarray after years of war and sanctions. Dire shortages of protective equipment and staff nationwide prompted strikes by medical workers as infections rise in their ranks. A drastic undersupply of drugs and hard currency forces the sick to purchase essential medicine out of pocket. A lack of fuel has made it increasingly difficult for doctors and patients to reach hospitals.
“These are the problems that Sudan faces everywhere, but in Darfur it is more severe,” said Dr Babikir El Magboul, director of the Health Ministry’s Emergency and Epidemiology Department. “It’s like a separate continent.”
Many in Darfur’s camps are undernourished and weakened by infectious diseases like malaria and acute watery diarrhoea. At Abushouk camp, each bathroom is shared by dozens of people. Around the territory, markets and mosques — along with a growing number of funerals — continue to draw crowds.
Darfur, with a population of 9 million, has only around 600 health facilities, or one per 15,000 people. With facilities scattered over an area the size of Spain, residents in rural areas must travel long distances to reach one. Doctors say quarantine centres have no more than a few dozen beds, two or three ventilators and cheap gowns and surgical masks for protection equipment.
Before a new testing center opened this month in Nyala, South Darfur, testing was centralised in one laboratory in the capital, Khartoum, which processes just around 270 samples each day. Health workers in Darfur say that results can take a week to come through.