900,000 Rohingya In Danger As COVID-19 Reaches World's Largest Refugee Camp
The case was spotted in the camps at Cox¡¯s Bazaar in Bangladesh on Thursday.
First COVID-19 case was spotted in one of the largest refugee camps in Bangladesh, which currently holds around nine lakh Rohingya refugees, living in overcrowded and unhygienic conditions.
Reuters
Reported first by Vice, The case was spotted in the camps at Cox¡¯s Bazaar in Bangladesh on Thursday. The entire refuge area consists of 34 camps which are home to over 855,000 Rohingya Muslims, who fled Myanmar in 2017 after facing severe genocidal violence.
Just to put things into perspective of how dangerous the situation can get: The density of people living in the camps is around 103,000 people per square mile. That¡¯s a lot of people, in a really small space.
Authorities have been under a strict lockdown for a couple of weeks now. Even the aid groups that were helping people in these refugee camps have stopped their operations to prevent getting infected after one of the first cases of COVID-19 surfaced in town near Cox¡¯s Bazaar.
Speaking of the COVID-19 case in the refugee camp, United Nation¡¯s refugee agency has confirmed it and has stated that the infected Rohingya refugee has been isolated, while authorities are contact-tracing to understand who all could have gotten infected, however, officials fear that it¡¯s already too late and the disease might have spread wider than imagined.
Reuters
What¡¯s worse is that there is very little that can be done for maintaining hygiene since they live in crowded one-room shacks, where bathroom and toilet facilities are already overcrowded. Access to clean water and soap isn¡¯t present.
Moreover, testing in camps isn¡¯t as fast-paced as necessary with only 93 tests carried out since Tuesday, last week, according to the World Health Organisation. Moreover, the situations would only worsen with the commencement of Monsoon season that would make the already poor sanitary conditions inhabitable.
Bangladesh currently is in a state of lockdown since March 26, and has reported over 18,000 cases of the novel coronavirus with over 280 deaths.
