The second wave of COVID-19 in India has been devastating, with a catastrophic rise in the numbers of new infections in recent weeks. The country has now recorded over 18.7 million cases and over 208,000 deaths [1]. The outbreak of the new coronavirus is overwhelming for all healthcare providers. The situation is dire, with a lack … Read more
Over the course of 2020, COVID-19 thrust the world into a severe global health crisis. The rapid spread of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 put a tremendous strain on healthcare systems in low- and high-resource settings alike, as large numbers of patients with potentially life-threatening respiratory disease required specialised care. With no effective treatments available and stocks of personal protective … Read more
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is restarting emergency response amid a surging second wave of COVID-19 in Mumbai in Maharashtra. The city is very densely populated and the poor and dilapidated hygiene conditions are a triple trigger for the virus to breed, infect and spread rapidly. Daily new infections across the country have reached … Read more
More than 12 months into Brazil’s COVID-19 emergency, there is still no effective, centralised and coordinated public health response to the outbreak. The lack of political will to adequately respond to the pandemic is killing Brazilians in their thousands. Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is urgently calling on Brazilian authorities to acknowledge the severity of the crisis and to … Read more
ADEN – Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is seeing a dramatic influx of critically ill COVID-19 patients requiring hospitalisation in Aden, Yemen and many other parts of the country. “We are urging all medical humanitarian organisations already present in Yemen to rapidly scale up their COVID-19 emergency response,” says Raphael Veicht, Head of Mission of MSF in Yemen. “International … Read more
Opinion by Brice de le Vingne, head, MSF emergency desk One year ago, on 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak of COVID-19 a pandemic. At Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) – where providing medical care during epidemics and pandemics is at the core of what we do – we faced dual challenges. … Read more
On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak of the new coronavirus, COVID-19, a worldwide pandemic. Since January 2020, MSF teams around the world have been responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, in both countries where we’ve previously worked, and those we haven’t had to work in before. Meanwhile, we have also ensured people … Read more
At the end of July 2020 in Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, something strange started happening. In hospitals across the city, the doctors and nurses sweating in the Iraqi summer heat noticed that while their COVID-19 intensive care units were ever full, the wards for people with less severe cases were emptying out. “The hospitals had been over-capacity … Read more
MSF teams struggle to keep up as COVID-19 cases surge, health system collapses NEW YORK/RIO DE JANEIRO —The descent into a second COVID-19 catastrophe in Brazil’s Amazon region is now unfolding in the Amazonas State capital, Manaus, said the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). All intensive care unit beds are full, there are long … Read more
From Latin America to Africa and from Asia to Europe, the pandemic has cost millions of lives. At the same time, it has affected people’s ability to access essential health services. In many places, the devastating knock-on effects of the pandemic have left people without life-saving assistance. MSF teams working in more than 70 countries … Read more