April 18, 2020

Height of discrimination during a pandemic

topic:	Health and Sanitation
located:	Afghanistan
editor:	Shadi Khan Saif

The COVID-19 pandemic has turned the world upside down and has also exposed in many ways the best and worst of us human beings during such testing times.

As war-ravaged Afghanistan grapples with this disaster of a mammoth scale, the hopelessness of some vulnerable segments of the society became more evident and stark than under normal circumstances. As more and more cases of the novel  virus begin  to emerge all over the country, the disparities of poor and those with no political connections turned into desperate pleas for help.

In a number of viral social media posts, family and friends of frontline health workers as well as others on the margins in the society narrated tragic tales as the coronavirus pandemic ripped through their ranks with an upward trajectory.

Dr. Hanifullah Hanif, a specialist physician for internal medicine at a private hospital in Kabul, was the first person in the fragile health system to lose his life to the novel virus. He was followed by Dr. Yousef Aryoubi, a public hospital doctor in the capital city while Dr. Iqbal Omari, a surgeon at the Indira Gandhi Children's Health Hospital in Kabul, was the third doctor to lose his life of coronavirus in Kabul this month.

In an open letter, Dr. Omari’s close family relative, Ali Sami, a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Corinth, Budapest, harshly criticized the health system for failing to save the doctor’s life.
Prior to this, Dr. Yousef Aryoubi’s brother Zalmay Aryaee staged a desperate protest in front of the Afghan – Japan hospital in Kabul pleading for help. Afghanistan faced up to the COVID-19 challenge almost three months after the coronavirus was first detected in China last December.

The threat came knocking on the country’s western border with Iran, when thousands of panicked Afghan refugees started returning, voluntarily or otherwise, with evident symptoms of the COVID-19 disease. Those poor migrant workers are now back to the poverty and war they fled from.

There have been a barrage of allegations from provinces against top officials in the capital city Kabul for monopolizing the available resources while turning a blind eye to the needy and vulnerable in the remote parts of the country.

This is the last thing the country poor and defenseless like Afghanistan needs where the few elite take available means and resources for granted leaving majority of the population in dire straits.

Image by David Mark 

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