In the sprawling refugee camps of Sudan’s Darfur, officials say people are falling sick and dying at astonishing rates.
CAIRO — In the sprawling refugee camps of Darfur, the war-scarred western region of Sudan, officials say the elderly are falling sick and dying at astonishing rates.
In North Darfur’s provincial capital of El Fasher, some say they scroll through a dozen death announcements each day: Another old friend, relative, community leader lost with dizzying speed.
Doctors in the region’s few functioning hospitals report an influx of patients with symptoms like a lost sense of taste, breathing troubles and fevers. The official causes of their untimely deaths remain “unknown.”
Humanitarian workers and medical personnel believe the coronavirus is spreading unchecked and untracked through Sudan’s most marginalized territory, where medical facilities are few and far between and where years of conflict have left some 1.6 million people crammed into refugee camps.
Nationwide, Sudan has reported 6,879 coronavirus infections and 433 deaths, according to the Health Ministry. Of those, 193 cases and 54 fatalities have been confirmed across Darfur — a figure experts believe is a vast undercount.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, public health officials have sounded the alarm that the coronavirus will take a disastrous toll on the world’s most vulnerable regions, particularly refugee camps, where social distancing, even hand-washing, prove impossible.
“People in the camps are suffocating, they can’t breathe,” said Mohamed Hassan Adam, director of Abushouk displacement camp in North Darfur. Just a corner of the camp saw 64 unexplained deaths in one month, he said. His four neighbors, all in their sixties, grew feeble and vanished one by one.
“They get exhausted then they die. There is no way to tell what happened,” he said.
Authorities are scrambling to curb the spread of contagion amid a fragile democratic transition after massive protests last year toppled longtime autocrat Omar al-Bashir.
“We are in the eye of the storm,” said Ashraf Issa, spokesman for the U. N.-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur, referring to the country’s exponential surge in infections.
Sudan’s health care system is in disarray after years of war and sanctions. Dire shortages of protective equipment and staff nationwide prompted strikes by medical workers as infections rise in their ranks.
