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Doctors fear Lebanon can plunge into deeper crisis as new Covid wave emerges

Just Earth News | @justearthnews | 18 Jul 2021, 10:34 am Print

Doctors fear Lebanon can plunge into deeper crisis as new Covid wave emerges Lebanon Crisis

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Beirut: Public health experts have warned that hospitals in Lebanon are not equipped to cope with a huge flow of coronavirus patients as the number of new cases skyrocketed, spurred by the highly transmissible Delta variant.

For the first time since May, Lebanon recorded 577 cases on Friday.

On Saturday, this figure dipped a little to 488, bringing the total number of cases since the beginning of the outbreak to 550,492.

Lebanon is going through an acute financial and economic crisis, since 2019. And, its frayed infrastructure is in no position to support the load of critical Covid-19 patients, according to media reports.

The number of patients with coronavirus admitted to Rafik Hariri University Hospital (RHUH) had increased in recent days, according to the head of the facility, Dr Firass Abiad, said an Al Jazeera report.

“Our resources to deal with a new [COVID-19] wave are not what they were a year ago, or even last summer,” he said. “We are not well-prepared against what appears to be a dangerous variant [Delta],” he was quoted as saying by the news organisation.

The report said RHUH had played a major role in battling Covid-19 in Lebanon after it first emerged in the beginning of 2020.

The hospitals in Lebanon are already facing difficulties arising from the country’s economic crisis.

In recent weeks, severe power cuts have left the hospitals grappling with many areas getting as little as an hour of state-provided electricity in 24 hours, putting immense pressure on power generators used as back ups. Furthermore, generators cannot run around the clock due to an acute fuel crisis in the country.

A large amount of fuel is required to run the generators to keep the hospitals working and attending to patients.

Al Jazeera reported citing a government hospital doctor that the state-run medical facility cannot take coronavirus patients.

“We don’t have enough electricity to plug in an oxygen machine,” he was quoted as saying by Al Jazeera.

There is an extreme shortage of critical health supplies as the country cannot import them due to devaluation of its currency by more than 90 per cent and shortage of foreign exchange.

Even basic medications for pain management and hypertension, antibiotics, anesthetics, a doctor told Al Jazeera.