“When I go to the health centre, they often tell me there’s no medication available. The pharmacies regularly run out of drugs too,” says Mariam a Lebanese mother of eight, who lives in Abdeh, in the north of Lebanon. Mariam suffers from chronic diseases, including diabetes and cardiovascular problems. Her youngest son has asthma.
“I get anxious thinking about what would happen if I couldn’t work anymore,” she says. “How could I afford all the medications? I’d have to choose between the drugs for my son and the ones for me.”
Since the explosion, the public health system has also struggled to cope with the growing number of COVID-19 cases, which rose from less than 200 cases a day before the blast to an average of 1,500 cases per day in December 2020. To date, a total of over 199,000 cases have been reported.
Since August 2020, MSF has stepped up its efforts to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic response in Lebanon and support the national health system in dealing with the pandemic. The organization has temporarily turned its hospital in Bar Elias, in the Bekaa Valley, into a COVID-19 facility and is supporting an isolation center in Sibline, in the south of the country. On top of that, MSF teams are involved in testing, health promotion and trainings activities in different locations across the country. The lockdowns measures, although necessary, have contributed to exacerbating people’s economic difficulties.
“My husband used to find daily labouring jobs in agriculture or construction,” says Samaher, a 40-year-old Syrian refugee who lives in an informal tented settlement in Akkar governorate, near the Syrian border. “But with the economic situation and the coronavirus, it has become more difficult. He only works two or three days a week, and sometimes there’s no work for a fortnight. When he doesn’t find work, we have to borrow money from the neighbours so we can buy food.”