Protecting People's Health Is a National Imperative

If the official statistics are oblivious to the real numbers, then what Syrians touch on a daily basis is truer facts than any news. In the time when hospitals are overwhelmed with patients in Damascus, and when obtaining a home oxygen cylinder becomes a dream for many people, the burial office was mired in overcrowding and a postponement of burials, which we had never seen before. Coronavirus is no longer something we hear about in the media, rather it is a lived daily condition in all Syrian homes.

If the scenes of PCR test seekers for travel filled the media, it showed a small fraction of the government's impotence in this crisis. From the inability of hospitals to receive the large numbers of injured people, to the shortage of medicines that all pharmacies experienced, to the scenes of crowding at the bakeries and queues for getting rice and sugar on the doors of the branches of the Syrian Trade Institution, and in all places of government facilities, to the lists of deaths among doctors, pharmacists, medical personnel, university professors and lawyers and other lists of human losses that have aroused the Syrians’ resentment due to the government lies, accompanied by the government's stubborn insistence upon its claim that all of its plans are «fruitful». All of this leads us to shout loudly: We need a national emergency plan, a rescue plan that salvages what remains of the Syrians steadfasting in this homeland.

The false measures taken by the government to prevent gatherings had no more than a faint media effect. Today, Syrians are alarmed by the idea of opening schools, and the danger that the herd immunity policy practiced by the government will transform into herd extermination, by transmitting infection to every home, not to mention the danger to all the Syrian teaching staff, that might be exposed to what has happened to the medical and health staff, before.

The measures to reduce social contact are not just decisions to lift the blame, but rather a major national necessity, in all areas and at all levels, as well as the deep cleaning and sterilization procedures required in such circumstances, with the accompanying economic consequences that necessitate the distribution of the most important health services free of charge to the majority of the needy, from masks and disinfecting means, to oxygen cylinders, ventilators, medications and hospitals.

The budget announced by the government that allocated to the fight of coronavirus did not find its way to the state ministries, and this is clear and admitted by the Ministry of Finance, but rather remained a media bubble directed towards foreign opinion only, and the Caesar Act was only an additional pretext (despite being a real pressure) for the government to lay the responsibility of its own impotence on the door of this Act.

It is superfluous to remind that all we are witnessing are consequences of the corruption, which has become a direct threat to our survival.

The blame of responsibilities and the attempt to hold the Syrians themselves responsible for their health is nothing but an attempt to evade the premeditated murder, which is taking place through impoverishment, creating starvation and lack of the minimum requirements for a decent life.

The deficit reaching the point of inflicting even the health services, means that we had already lost a lot before reaching such a point, because healthcare is the minimum limit below the education, food and other services, in which the government deficit has become clear.

What is required today is an emergency plan to save the country from the Coronavirus, a plan that should be outside the coordinates of corruption, because the situation is no longer tolerable.

Kassioun Editorial, Issue 980, August 24, 2020.