WORLD: With everything going around the world, be it the protests about black lives or the US elections or India- China’s standoff or even the widespread of COVID-19 outbreak. A small country in the middle east, Yemen is at war and not just any war but as the UN says, the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet.
For the last five years, the ancient heart of Arabia has been torn apart. In a country of 29 million people, 24 million people depend on some kind of humanitarian help, which is nearly the entire population of Australia.
According to WHO, between 10 April, when the first case was confirmed, and 6 June, the authorities in Yemen announced 486 COVID-19 cases, including 112 deaths. The case fatality rate (CFR) is alarmingly high at 24.77 per cent.
There’s a huge famine which has hit the country, and citizens are dying. The country’s infrastructure has been destroyed completely because of the civil war. The country has no more than 500 ventilators and 700 ICU beds nationwide. There is one oxygen cylinder per month for every 2.5 million people.
The coronavirus is spreading throughout Yemen, bodies of coronavirus victims are buried in silence. Gravediggers and guards at the cemeteries are warned not to speak about the causes of the deaths. If asked, they are told to say that the dead are “unidentified bodies from the war,” according to several residents and one gravedigger. Families are never really told if their relatives died from the coronavirus, which is believed to be the culprit. Test results are never released. These daily funeral rituals come as social media are flooded with condolences and photographs of the dead.
The situation is only getting worse is the war torn country, and deaths because of corona are only rising everyday and adding numbers to the death toll which was already high because of the war. Local unions, who have kept their own death tallies from the coronavirus, report that 46 medical staffers, 28 judges, and 13 lawyers died in a three-week period between mid-May and early June, well above the Houthis’ official count.