Middle East Experience

"You’re spreading the virus, you gotta go," said the Johnstons Toyota employee.;
Source: Jerusalem Post
Full Article: Jewish man told 'you're spreading coronavirus,' asked to leave store

Soldiers are given ‘everything they need’ to feel at home, including Playstation;
Source: Jerusalem Post
Full Article: 170 lone soldiers at the IDF quarantine center in Olga

Over 1 million Israelis reached by the IDF's National Assistance Center in less than a week;
Source: Jerusalem Post
Full Article: Concern grows for at risk-population during coronavirus crisis

The Arab Coalition has intercepted and destroyed drones launched by the Houthi militia targeting the Saudi Arabian cities of Abha and Khamis Mushait, according to the coalition spokesperson.Colonel Turki al-Malki, the spokesperson for the Arab Coalition, confirmed the news in a statement carried by state-run Saudi Press Agency.The attack comes less than a day after Yemen's warring parties had welcomed a UN call for an immediate ceasefire on Thursday to focus on efforts to combat the coronavirus pandemic.Earlier this year, Saudi Arabian Military Industries said it was working on developing a new counter-drone system to protect the Kingdom's vital infrastructure and military bases.Saudi Arabia has faced repeated attacks in recent years from drones fired by the Houthi militia from the Kingdom’s southern border with Yemen.
Source: Al Arabiya
Full Article: Arab Coalition intercepts, destroys Houthi drones targeting Abha, Khamis Mushait

Iran’s inability to contain the spread of the coronavirus within its borders is endangering the Middle East region and beyond.
Source: Al Monitor
Full Article: Iran enlists Pakistan for support against sanctions as pandemic spreads

Lebanon’s public healthcare system was already in crisis when word of a new, deadly virus began to emanate from the Chinese city of Wuhan in January. Now, the arrival of coronavirus in Lebanon is putting further pressure on a crippled public health sector that has left some of the country’s most vulnerable at risk.Lebanon’s healthcare system is made up of both public and private sector providers, but over the past decades the private sector has increased its dominance, leaving public healthcare services disused and underfunded.According to a 2016 report, over 85 percent of hospital beds belonged to private hospitals. However, while private sector health services in Lebanon generally win praise for their quality, only around half the population has insurance coverage to access them reliably.Public alternatives for those unable to access private healthcare have been neglected for decades, leaving Lebanon with vast inequality in access to healthcare. “The public sector is the poor cousin. It had been almost destroyed during the civil war and only partially rebuilt to respond to the real needs of the country,” said Salim Adib, professor of epidemiology and public health at the American University of Beirut. “There’s too much conflict of interest between the private sector and the people in government.”Read more: Anger in Lebanon as insolvent banks donate $6 million for coronavirusLong-term stresses: influx of refugees and economic crisisThe recent surge of coronavirus patients to government hospitals has put stress on a system which was already feeling the strain from refugee and economic crises that stretched back years.Following the outbreak of the war in Syria, hundreds of thousands of refugees sought shelter in Lebanon.While this large, vulnerable population put further pressure on the public healthcare system – the proportion of Syrian beneficiaries at Rafic Hariri Governmental University Hospital (RHUH) increased from 2 percent in 2010 to 33 percent in 2014 – donations from major international NGOs and the EU provided a funding boost to local healthcare services.Read more: Syrian refugees in Lebanon face coronavirus threat without soap or sanitizerMore recently, Lebanon’s ongoing economic crisis hit the healthcare sector particularly hard as government funds to both private and public hospitals were delayed.The Finance Ministry failed to pay private hospitals around $1.3 billion in dues since 2011, according to the head of the Syndicate of Private Hospitals, while RHUH told Human Rights Watch in a report published Tuesday that the hospital had been paid only 40 percent of its dues from 2019, and none of those from 2020.Furthermore, medical suppliers rely almost exclusively on imports. As dollars dried up in the country, the high street dollar exchange rate started to creep up, eating into importers’ profit margins.Read more: Inside the global war for ventilators“The problem was [that] the local suppliers were not willing to bring these medical supplies from the country of origin because of the black market dollar exchange rate,” said Rawad Shehayeb, an assistant general manager at RHUH responsible for medical logistics. The hospital was forced to shift from its economical “Just in Time” stock keeping strategy to importing 2 months’ worth of materials, Shehayeb said.A support system was put in place last October, around the time that massive anti-government protests began to take hold of the country, but the value of the dollar has only risen further since then: at one point the greenback’s value reached almost twice the official rate on the black market. Then-caretaker Health Minister Jamil Jabak warned in November of “a major lack of supplies and equipment, and if this continues we could reach a very dangerous situation.”Coronavirus hits LebanonLebanon confirmed its first case of coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, on February 21, a patient who was admitted to the public RHUH.RHUH, and the public sector more broadly, has so far taken the lead in the country’s coronavirus response, especially as some private insurers have said that their insurance coverage does not extend to treatment for the virus, given its global pandemic status. Private hospitals are offering coronavirus testing, but at a cost of 150,000 Lebanese lira ($100 at the official exchange rate) – in contrast to the free testing at RHUH.Despite a dearth of equipment - only around 250 respirators are currently available across the public and private sectors, and equipment importers say that have been unable to import medical equipment since September – the RHUH coronavirus treatment center has so far managed to accommodate the hundreds of patients it treats daily.Read more: Coronavirus-infected mother, new-born quarantined at Lebanese hospitalThis is partly because the disease has spread comparatively slowly in Lebanon, a fact Adib puts down to social distancing techniques as well as the country’s young population - CIA statistics from 2018 put Lebanon’s median age at 30.5, compared to, for example, Italy at 45.5.Cases continue to rise, however, with the total up to 333 confirmed cases and 6 recorded deaths on Wednesday, and it is unclear whether poorly funded public hospitals alone will be able to cope with an influx. Earlier this month, non-frontline staff at RHUH even called a strike to protest non-payment of wages and poor working conditions.In response, Lebanon’s government recently approved a much-needed cash injection of $40 million in World Bank funding for government hospitals involved in the coronavirus response and the Association of Lebanese Banks announced on Tuesday a $6 million donation to government hospitals battling the virus.More public hospitals are preparing to open their doors to patients, and Lebanon’s government has already asked private hospitals to be ready to accept patients – although it is unclear who would fund this.For more coronavirus news, visit our dedicated page.Recent statistics from the Ministry of Public Health show that the private sector has around four times as many intensive care beds as the public sector, which could be vital in the country’s efforts to combat coronavirus.“We believe that we have two critical weeks now,” said Dr Pierre Abi Hanna, an infectious disease expert at RHUH.Normally, Abi Hanna said, RHUH is a “hospital of the very sick and the poor … [Now] the whole country is relying on the government hospital to take care of those people, to be the first line of defense in the country against this epidemic.”Read more: Lebanon priest flies over Beirut to bless country over coronavirus fears
Source: Al Arabiya
Full Article: Coronavirus puts spotlight on Lebanon’s ailing public healthcare system

Recent scientific tests are starting to reveal more about the coronavirus, known technically as COVID-19, including one recent discovery: that the virus has at least 40 mutations.As the coronavirus pandemic continues to sweep the world, scientists are scrambling to discover as much information as they can that could help to slow the spread of the deadly pathogen. Now, with evidence that the coronavirus mutates, they are hoping that they can learn more through studying the virus’ genes – perhaps eventually helping to find a future treatment.But what does it mean for a virus to mutate, and why does it matter? Here is everything you need to know.Mutations in coronavirus: EvidenceEvidence that the coronavirus mutates was brought to attention back in late February by Christian Drosten, the head of the Institute of Virology at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin.Drosten studied a German patient who had caught coronavirus in Italy, and a separate German patient who had caught coronavirus a month before in Munich. Both cases had three genetic mutations which had not been seen in any samples from Wuhan, China, where the pathogen first broke out.Based on this evidence, Drosten suggested that it was likely that a Chinese variant carrying the three mutations had taken independent routes to Germany and Italy.Since then, further tests have revealed more evidence that the coronavirus mutates.In early March, Chinese researchers identified 149 mutations in the 103 sequenced genomes of the coronavirus.In the same week, Scientists from Brazil and the United Kingdom said the samples collected from the first patient in Latin America was slightly different from the strain from Wuhan by three mutations.More recently, Iceland’s high-volume testing revealed there are at least 40 mutations of the virus in the country of 340,000 people alone.Read more: Coronavirus now has two strains - and you can get bothIs it normal for viruses to mutate?Yes. According to scientists, it is normal for viruses to mutate.“Viruses mutate naturally as part of their life cycle,” said Ewan Harrison, scientific project manager for the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium, a new project that tracks the virus in the United Kingdom.Dr Derek Gatherer, an infectious disease specialist at Lancaster University, said he was not surprised with the findings in Iceland.“This is much as we would expect. All viruses accumulate mutations, but few of them are of much medical consequence,” he said.Like all viruses, coronavirus evolves over time through random mutations, added Andrew Rambaut, a molecular evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh.“Over the length of its 30,000-base-pair genome, SARS-CoV-2 accumulates an average of about one to two mutations per month,” he said.Read more: Bahrain accuses Iran of ‘biological aggression,’ over coronavirus spreadWhat can scientists learn from the mutations?As the coronavirus continues to spread across the globe, the virus is changing its genetic makeup. According to scientists, genomic sequencing of the samples will help understand the spread of the virus and guide treatments.“Genomic sequencing will help us understand COVID-19 and its spread. It can also help guide treatments in the future and see the impact of interventions,” Patrick Vallance, British government’s chief scientific adviser, said in the statement on Monday.UK scientists are using gene sequencing to analyze the strains causing thousands of coronavirus infections across the country. Working in teams across Britain, scientists will map out and analyze the full genetic codes of the COVID-19 samples, Reuters reported.Researchers at DeCode genetics, who conducted the testing which revealed 40 mutations in Iceland, said on Monday that the variants discovered could act as the fingerprints of the virus to trace its origin. Seven of the infected people were traced to an undisclosed football match in England, the researchers said.Kári Stefánsson, director of DeCode Genetics, said, “We can see how viruses mutate. We have found 40 island-specific virus mutations … We found someone who had a mixture of viruses.”Stefánsson added, “Some came from Austria. There is another type from people who were infected in Italy. And there is a third type of virus found in people infected in England. Seven people had attended a football match in England.”“It is interesting with the 40 specific variants that fall into three clusters that can be traced back to specific sources of infection,” Allan Randrup Thomsen, a virologist with the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at the University of Copenhagen, said. “Coronavirus is known as a virus that can mutate reasonably violently. We have seen reports of variants from China already. That way, it fits well with what one expects.”Rambaut also pointed to the speed of the coronavirus as revealing information about its nature.“It’s about two to four times slower than the flu,” he said. “Using these little changes, researchers can draw up phylogenetic trees, much like family trees. They can also make connections between different cases of COVID-19 and gauge whether there might be undetected spread of the virus.”Read more: Behind the name: Why is pandemic called coronavirus, COVID-19?How do mutations affect immunity?Could coronavirus mutate into a different strain so that it would be able to overcome the built-up immune defenses? Not necessarily, according to experts.“I would predict that SARSCoV2 will behave similarly to existing seasonal coronaviruses in its ability to mutate to avoid vaccines and immunity,” says Trevor Bedford of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, who analyzes the stream of viral genomes and discusses them in Twitter threads.He says almost all the mutations of coronavirus will have little to no effect on the function of the virus.“My prediction is that we should see occasional mutations to the spike protein of SARSCoV2 that allow the virus to partially escape from vaccines or existing "herd" immunity, but that this process will most likely take years rather than months,” he tweeted.Since its outbreak, the coronavirus is mutating in the way that all viruses do, but it hasn’t changed in any important way.“The virus has been remarkably stable given how much transmission we’ve seen,” says Lisa Gralinski of the University of North Carolina. “That makes sense, because there’s no evolutionary pressure on the virus to transmit better.”Read more: Coronavirus: What is herd immunity and will it affect the pandemic?How do mutations impact the development of a vaccine?Coronavirus mutations have not impacted the development of a vaccine against the disease, says Zhou Qi, deputy secretary general of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.“We have received a lot of information about the mutations of the virus. However, the mutations seen in the virus so far have not affected vaccine development and research,” Qi said. “We are actively monitoring the degree to which the virus mutates, we are conducting research.”According to Bedford it will take a few years for coronavirus to mutate enough to significantly hinder a vaccine.Read more: Coronavirus: Vaccines and treatments being developedThe coronavirus test you don’t know about, but should: ExpertsFlattening the coronavirus curve in the Arab worldOpinion: Coronavirus augurs the inevitable collapse of a global economy in ‘overshoot’
Source: Al Arabiya
Full Article: Coronavirus mutates into 40 strains. How this changes the pandemic outlook: Experts

Authorities across the region have taken draconian measures to curb the disease, closing airports and halting passenger flights, and bringing major hubs like Dubai and Abu Dhabi to a standstill
Source: Arabian Business
Full Article: Survival of the Fittest: Mideast airlines brace for Covid-19 impact

Hedge funds and private-equity firms on Wall Street could lose a substantial piece of business as Gulf funds channel wealth back home
Source: Arabian Business
Full Article: Gulf sovereign wealth funds could shed 0bn amid Covid-19 chaos

Amid fears of catastrophic consequences in case of a coronavirus outbreak in the besieged Gaza Strip, two Palestinians took the lead and started a factory to produce protective suits.
Source: Al Monitor
Full Article: Old Gazan factory restored to produce protective suits amid pandemic