Virus threat ‘a new terror’ in Syria’s scarred Idlib region
Nurses hover over a patient to insert a breathing tube as his condition suddenly deteriorates. ICU beds fill up almost overnight. As one patient dies of the coronavirus and is wheeled out, another is whisked in to take his place. An exhausted doctor leans against a wheelchair for a breather.
The pace is dizzying at the largest isolation hospital in Syria’s northwestern city of Idlib. There are no bombs falling outside and the wounded do not crowd bloodstained corridors amid a shaky cease-fire in the country’s decade old civil war. Still, the intensive care unit staff is overwhelmed with beds full of elderly patients gasping for air.
COVID-19 infections in the last opposition-controlled territory in Syria have been increasing rapidly. Spared until July, the region is now recording 300-500 infections a day, and the number is rising fast. The area, battered by repeated military offensives from the regime of Bashar Assad, is home to nearly 4 million people, most of them displaced and living in tent camps or unfinished buildings. Infection rates jumped nearly twentyfold between September and October, the UN said. Since then, it has climbed 300 percent, with nearly 11,900 cases recorded by Nov. 16, up from 8,100 a week earlier.
The number of infections is probably much higher. Cities have been hit hardest, but workers fear the virus will take hold in overcrowded camps.
“There are many patients, most in very bad condition. We have no time to give them all they need,” said Aref Shabib, one of over 95 nurses and technicians in the 70-bed isolation hospital, one of two in the city of Idlib, now a virus hot spot.
The pandemic, which has severely tested even developed countries, is the biggest challenge yet for Syria’s health sector, already depleted by years of conflict. Authorities are pacing themselves, deploying equipment and supplies where needed in war-scarred areas.
Ambulance driver Rami Khalaf ferried a patient and a nurse for three hours from the city of Idlib
to a southern town for a breathing machine. By the time they arrived, they found there was no oxygen available, so they headed to a third location, another three-hour drive. With the nurse tending to the unconscious patient with one hand and operating a walkie-talkie
in a search for lifesaving equipment with the other, they drove more than 200 km.
Khalaf sat sweating behind the wheel for seven hours in his hazmat suit and mask, driving on unpaved and bombed-out roads. “We are living a new difficult
experience,” he said.
At least Khalaf didn’t have to dodge bombs. Medical teams and hospitals often were targeted by government forces that accuse them of treating “terrorists” — its label for opposition fighters.
But carrying virus patients is a
new challenge. Khalaf transported nearly 50 patients in 10 days, up from practically none in October. He keeps away from his children for two to three days to avoid infecting them.
“It is a new terror that is going around among us,” he said.