Coronavirus in Syria hits UN employees

Although the UN has strengthened emergency plans to address the rapid spread of the pandemic in the country, its own workers have not been spared from infection. Medical workers and UN officials have reported that more than 200 employees have contracted the disease. UN Resident Coordinator and Humanitarian Coordinator in Syria, Imran Reda, last Tuesday told UN heads of agencies in a letter to distribute to staff that the UN was in the final stages of securing a medical facility for treatment of cases. “More than two hundred cases have been reported among UN staff members, some of whom have been hospitalized and three who were medically evacuated,” the top UN official in Syria said in the letter, which was leaked to Reuters from an infected local staff member.

Quarantine is a global prevention measure and confinement, along with curfew, is a practice that has been in place in Syria for years. This is particularly true in the hottest conflict areas. But UN workers, despite the pandemic, have to keep moving around to hold meetings, contact communities, take data, confirm facts, assist medically and continue to write reports. Reda said there had been a ten-fold spike in infections in Syria in the two months since he last briefed staff, referring to health ministry figures that say there have been 3,171 cases and 134 deaths since the first case was reported on March 23.

Humanitarian workers and medics said the real number of cases is considerably higher, including the hundreds of staff employed by NGO partners working for the dozen U.N. agencies that oversee the country's largest humanitarian relief operations. Damascus-based medics and relief workers are skeptical of official figures, saying the authorities are covering up, as well as claiming testing is limited.

The epidemiological situation in the country has changed considerably and the The United Nations has expressed concern about the spread of the coronavirus in a country where the health infrastructure has been shattered by war and medical supplies are limited. Independent medics and relief workers say scores of doctors and medical workers have died in recent weeks.

As Médecins Sans Frontières has been explaining, Humanitarian organisations, too, have to make impossible choices in these circumstances. What measures should we take to prevent a potential spread of the virus? Should we stop our work in the camps to prevent people gathering in front of our mobile clinics or during our distributions of essential items? Are we protecting people if we stop our activities, or are we depriving them of essential services and therefore potentially putting their health at greater risk?" explained Cristian Reynders, MSF field coordinator for northwest Syria, in April.

If you develop serious symptoms, you need to go to a hospital. But when only a handful of hospitals are open, and these hospitals are already overstretched and are completely unequipped to deal with a public health emergency, where can you actually go? The health infrastructure has been suffering from casualties since the war began in 2011. Today, the conflict is concentrated in the province of Idlib, the last bastion controlled by insurgent factions against the government of Damascus. But the war's passage through the rest of the country has left medical facilities badly damaged, affecting not only the population but also the humanitarian workers themselves in the area.