Yemen’s internationally recognized government announced on Friday the first confirmed case of the new coronavirus in the war-torn country, stoking fears that an outbreak could devastate its already crippled health care system.
The case is a 73-year-old Yemeni national who works at the port of al-Shahr in Hadramawt province, Yemen’s Minister of Health Nasser Baoum told The Associated Press. The man is in stable condition, the minister added, without providing further details.
Yemen is a uniquely dangerous place for the coronavirus to spread. Repeated bombings and ground fighting over five years of war have destroyed or closed more than half its health facilities. Deep poverty, dire water shortages and a lack of adequate sanitation have made the country a breeding ground for disease.
The Saudi-led coalition fighting the Iran-backed Houthi rebels declared a cease-fire on Thursday on humanitarian grounds, to prevent the spread of the pandemic. However, fighting continued unabated on Friday, diminishing hopes of a truce that could open doors for peace talks.
Yemen’s war erupted in 2014, when the rebels seized the capital, Sanaa, and much of the country’s north. The U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition intervened to oust the rebels and restore the internationally recognized government. The conflict has killed over 100,000 people and largely settled into a bloody stalemate.
The U.N. has described Yemen as the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. Cholera outbreaks are the worst in modern history. Over 24 million people in the country require humanitarian assistance, many of them on the brink of starvation.
Hadramawt recently witnessed an outbreak of dengue fever, with hundreds of cases filling the public hospital of al-Shahr, where the coronavirus case was detected.
In Yemen’s under-equipped and barely functioning health system, it’s hard to distinguish between viral diseases. One young man with dengue fever died after a hospital in Mukalla, the provincial capital of Hadramawt, refused to admit him for fear he was carrying the coronavirus, two local aid and government officers said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to reporters.
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Some of the symptoms of dengue fever are similar to the coronavirus, including muscle aches and fever.
To try to curb the spread of the virus, provincial Gov. Farag al-Bouhsni announced on his Facebook page a partial curfew and placed all workers at the al-Shahr port under a 14-day quarantine. Residents criticized the governor for not shutting down all ports in Hadramawt, which are the main lifeline for aid and commercial shipments for southern Yemen.
According to WHO data, 15% of Yemen’s districts have no doctors, with an average of 10 health workers and less than 5 hospital beds for every 10,000 people. According to Save the Children, there are 700 ICU beds and 500 ventilators for the entire population.
Elsewhere in the Mideast, the number of coronavirus infections rose in Israel, with the Health Ministry on Friday reporting more than 10,000 cases, including 92 deaths. The government imposed strict measures to contain the pandemic early on but has seen it tear through the insular ultra-Orthodox religious community.
The virus causes mild to moderate symptoms in most patients, who recover within a few weeks. But it can cause severe illness or death, particularly in older patients or those with underlying health problems.
Israeli authorities moved quickly in mid-March to close borders, ground flights and shut down all non-essential businesses. But in the early days and weeks of the pandemic many in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community ignored guidelines on social distancing, which health experts say is key to containing the outbreak.
The Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the occupied West Bank and also imposed a widespread lockdown early on, reported its second virus death, out of 253 confirmed cases. It says 45 people have recovered.
Also Friday, authorities in Oman ordered those living in the capital, Muscat, to remain there while banning people from traveling into the city over the virus. The country has more than 450 confirmed cases with two confirmed deaths.
There are more than 134,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the Middle East, including over 5,300 fatalities. Some 4,200 of those deaths are in Iran, which has the largest outbreak in the region. Authorities there had recorded over 68,000 total cases as of Friday.
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Associated Press writers Joe Krauss in Jerusalem, Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates and Isabel DeBre contributed to this report.
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