They are defenseless against this pandemic
Two metrics are important in judging the
threat of Covid-19: Its infectiousness -- how easily it spreads; and its
mortality -- what proportion of those it infects end up dying from the disease.
Because if it does, all hell will break
loose. We have seen from the experience of Europe that even countries with
advanced healthcare systems like Italy and Spain can be quickly overrun, with
catastrophic consequences.
After all that they have gone through, the
Rohingya are, like the rest of us, facing a killer even deadlier than the
Myanmar military: The Covid-19 epidemic. And it won’t do Bangladesh any good to
allow Cox’s Bazar to become an epicentre of infectious disease.
At the moment it is difficult to quantify
exactly how infectious this disease is. But we know it transmits not just from
droplets from coughs or sneezes, but also from aerosols, ie from people just
breathing out normally.
We know it can persist on some surfaces up to
three days. And we know that virtually no one has any kind of natural immunity
to it.
Add to this that some people do not develop
symptoms at all, but can still transmit the virus while they are carrying it,
and you have a situation where only the most extreme measures of social
isolation and societal lockdown of the kind we have seen in China have any hope
of working, once the disease appears in a population.
In conditions like those the Rohingya are
living in, in Cox’s Bazar, containing the disease will be virtually impossible,
once it appears. The Rohingya are living in conditions with more than 100,000
people per square mile, with virtually no space to isolate or quarantine
anyone.
No space even to limit human-to-human contact
in any significant degree so as to slow down the spread of such an infectious
disease. To say nothing of the limited scope for proper hygiene in the public
spaces, or the very limited availability of medical supplies -- masks,
disinfectant gels, etc are effectively out of the question.
For that reason alone, as heartbreaking as it
was, it was the right thing to do to put Cox’s Bazar in lockdown. We do know at
least from the experience of China so far that extreme measures such as this
can hinder the transmission of the disease, and it is absolutely imperative
that the virus is pre-empted from making its way into the Rohingya camps.
In the best-case scenarios, scientists
believe that the disease could have a mortality rate as low as under 1%.
Northern Italy has seen rates of close to 10% of those infected. But 15-25% of
those infected develop acute, life-threatening symptoms which need
hospitalization to manage. In other words, in conditions such as those in Cox’s
Bazar, mortality rates could easily reach 20%.
So Cox’s Bazar is a place where, if the virus
gets in, virtually everyone in those camps is guaranteed to get it, and as many
as 20% of those who get it are likely to die. We are talking 200,000 people. An
order of magnitude more than those killed by the Myanmar military.
Humanitarian disaster aside, we need to also
think about how human beings, like us, are likely to react in these
circumstances.
In other words, what are the odds that
Rohingya families, fearing for the lives of their children or loved ones, will
stay put in Cox’s Bazar and wait for the virus to get to them and decimate
their families? Would you stay put in these conditions?
But if Rohingya start to flee Cox’s Bazar in
numbers, what then? By the time they start fleeing, at least some of them will
be carrying the virus.
What does that mean for the rest of
Bangladesh? And what do we propose to do when that happens? Will we use
military force to confine them, and so kill even more? Will we become even
worse than Myanmar?
The only chance to avoid this absolute
calamity from happening is to take the most amount of care to quash the
transmission of the virus in the country as a whole and devote every resource
we have available (including resources we can request from the international
community) to ensure the disease does not reach the refugee camps.
In other words, we need to go directly to
full lockdown measures as a country, and we need to do it now. We must contain
the few tens of cases we have already and prevent them from becoming more than
1,000. If we get to 10,000, we will be fighting a losing battle.
And after we get the situation under control,
we will have to regulate border crossings so as to quarantine everyone coming
in for at least three weeks, for the rest of this year and next. We do not have
time for incremental measures. We cannot afford to wait for the situation to
develop.
We cannot approach the political tactics of
this by allowing the situation to get worse so that the population gets on
board with harsh measures before we go to full lockdown. Bangladesh cannot
afford that. We must act now.
By Azeem Ibrahim, is Senior Fellow at the Centre
for Global Policy and Adj Research Professor at the Strategic Studies
Institute, US Army War College.