Rise in Coronavirus deaths reported in southern Yemen

Special Desk

There has been a surge in the number of people dying with coronavirus-like symptoms in the southern Yemeni city of Aden and there is a fear that Yemen’s health system may not be able to manage the outbreak.

Citing official figures, Save the Children, an organisations working for children in several countries, stated there had been at least 380 deaths in the past one week. Now the fear is number of coronavirus cases may be far higher than the few dozen that have been confirmed till now.

It is pertinent to know that the health system has been damaged by years of civil war and life support systems ventilators are in short supply, and this is a crisis situation. Save the Children said some health professionals lacking personal protective equipment were refusing to go to work.

Several hospitals have closed, and people are dying because they can’t get treatment, it said in a statement. Mohammed Alshamaa, Save the Children’s director of programmes in Yemen, said they were hearing of families who have lost two or three members in recent weeks.

Our teams on the ground are seeing how people are being sent away from hospitals, breathing heavily or even collapsing. People are dying because they can’t get treatment, he said.

There are fears that a coronavirus outbreak could be disastrous in Yemen, a country already suffering from years of war. There are only 500 ventilators in the country, and just four labs that can test for the virus. World Health Organization says number of confirmed infections are 72, with 13 deaths, but reports suggest the actual number could be higher.