While in most developed countries, you see people with face masks everywhere and ambulances are called at the first sign of COVID -19, there is a parallel life elsewhere the world – for example, Yemen. “Hospitals don’t accept anyone with a cough,” said Noor, a journalist in the southern port city of Aden, Yemen.
So, what do you do in Yemen if you feel ill? Stay at home and pray that the symptoms will disappear by themselves? Pray that you will not end up like the father and son from a family in Yemen who also had a cough and fever and are now both dead? Noor, in her mid-twenties and otherwise healthy, luckily recovered quickly. Her official story now is that she had “dengue or malaria”. Maybe she even had corona. “And we’re not sure either, because you can’t get tested.”
In Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world, corona can spread “faster, further and with more deadly consequences” than anywhere else in the world, the UN warned in April 2020. COVID-19 represents yet another plot twist in a long-running drama: a civil war that has continued for five years, as many as three different ruling parties, one of whom, the southern separatists, gained power in Aden in the middle of the corona epidemic in May. More than 24 million people depend on aid organizations for their existence. The previous health catastrophe, a cholera outbreak that took more than 3880 lives especially among young children, has not been forgotten here.
THREATS
The Yemeni Health Ministry is reluctant to publicize the fact that corona has now been added to the country’s ongoing misery. While videos of graves being hastily dug in Aden for COVID-19 victims are circulating on social media, only a few hundred cases of infection out of a population of more than 28 million have officially been registered. No one has any idea of the magnitude of the actual outbreak but this number is so improbably low that the UN openly doubts it.
And so, in Yemen, life goes on as if the virus was not floating around. A lockdown is out of the question because of poverty: the threat of starvation is too real for that option.
“There is no social distancing,” said Nesmah Mansoor, an engineer and peace activist living in Aden. “The streets are busy. There is a lot of hugging and kissing. We have neighbors who have died. Two friends’ fathers died. I am very concerned about older family members.”
SHAME
Face masks? They are barely visible on the street. After all, wearing a face mask suggests that you could have the virus yourself and that can be seen as shameful, not only for yourself, but for your family as well. “If someone says “I have COVID-19”, there is a chance that other people will isolate the whole family,” said Jacqueline Parlevliet, who works for the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, in Sanaa, Yemen’s constitutionally stated capital.
Those who become ill try to recover at home with vitamin C pills as the only available medicine. Half of all the hospitals in Yemen are out of use due to consequences of the violent war and the hospitals that are open often send potential COVID-19 patients away. “Especially in Aden, hospitals refuse patients with respiratory complaints,” said Claire Ha-Duong, head of the Medics Sans Frontiers (MSF) Mission in Yemen, from Sanaa. “Doctors don’t have enough protective equipment. That is why there is a great fear of the virus among medical staff.” This leads to impossible choices. “A few days ago, in Aden, all our beds were occupied. We had to refuse patients. But then a patient died and, as terrible as it sounds, her bed became available.”
In this context, the Aden-based government has called for urgent global assistance to help a health sector that has been decimated by years of war. “More personal protective equipment (PPE) and testing capacity urgently needs to be imported into Yemen both for the national health system and for humanitarian organisations,” said Caroline Seguin, MSF operations manager for Yemen.
Currently, Yemen relies heavily on Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations. All the open job opportunities for assisting Yemen can be found on DevelopmentAid platform.
