Myanmar faces worst Covid crisis

It’s hard to find logic in the actions of a leadership that attacks doctors and nurses at the height of a pandemic. And yet that’s happening in Myanmar.
In response to civil disobedience by medical staff after a military coup in
February, soldiers have hijacked ambulances, arrested personnel and confiscated equipment. In a collapsing state, it’s helping to accelerate a calamity of unknown proportions. Official figures put Covid-19 infections at more than 310,000 and deaths at over 10,000, but the junta’s appeal for help last week, anecdotal evidence of overwhelmed funeral services and even new crematoriums suggest that’s likely a fraction of the real toll. Myanmar has suffered crippling disaster before while under deeply isolated and incompetent military rule. In 2008, Cyclone Nargis killed an estimated 138,000 and displaced hundreds of thousands in the Irrawaddy Delta. The regime made things worse by resisting international aid that it feared as interference.
The mishandling of the crisis and the international aid that eventually poured in contributed to the tentative opening that followed. The Covid catastrophe is unlikely to have the same effect, with a junta newly back in power and showing no signs of yielding.
The only hope is that the extent to which the country’s structures and economy have crumbled and the threat of contagion — with new variants circulating, at a time when much of Southeast Asia is grappling
with record surges — will prompt action from the international actors who have the greatest clout here and the most at stake: Myanmar’s neighbours.
The pandemic picture is grim. From around 2,000 tallied daily cases in early July, numbers had more than doubled by the middle of the month. By July 19, United Nations figures put the test positivity rate at 39%, compared to 22% two weeks earlier. Desperate citizens have struggled to get their hands on oxygen cylinders, with demand soaring and sales or refills restricted by a military leadership that says it is trying to control hoarding. The situation is worse for political detainees, held in crowded prisons. Nyan Win, a senior adviser to ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi, died last month after contracting Covid-19 in jail.
Less than 3.4 million vaccine doses have been distributed in a population of 54 million — one of the lowest and slowest rates in the region. Doctors and nurses, already in short supply, have been continually harassed by a government unhappy to be opposed by a well-organised professional group. In three months from February 11, Physicians for Human Rights counted 157 arrests and 73 raids on hospitals. The World Health Organization counts 260 attacks to date. The health emergency is compounded by floods across parts of the country, widespread unrest and clashes in the borderlands that have displaced tens of thousands, plus an economy expected to be almost a third smaller by the end of this fiscal year than it would have been without Covid-19 and the coup.

—Bloomberg