More than 320,000 coronavirus cases in Middle East
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There are now more than 320,000 officially reported cases of Covid-19 in the Middle East.
The virus continues to spread slowly in most countries, although in the Gulf daily increases tend to exceed five percent.
In addition, several countries that reported few cases are now seeing rises, including Yemen and Sudan.
In Israel, there are now 230 people who have died of the novel coronavirus in Israel, the Health Ministry reported Sunday morning.
Some 6,329 people are infected with the virus, including 103 in serious condition, among them 82 on ventilators.So far, 9,634 people have recovered from COVID-19.
The largest number of coronavirus cases are found in Turkey which has 124,375.
Turkey in early mid-March claimed that it was a model for fighting the virus and had just a handful of cases. However, it saw rapid increases in late March and early April, leading to an extensive outbreak. Turkey now claims it has gotten it under control and that there are only a few thousand new cases a day.
Iran, which saw a huge outbreak in February, has also seen cases declining. It now has 96,448 cases according to its government reported statistics. There are concerns that Iran’s data may be too low or that its government is involved in a cover-up.
Syria, Libya and Yemen, which are in the midst of civil war, both have very low numbers of cases. There are only 44 reported cases in Syria and 63 in Libya. There are now ten cases in Yemen.
Because the UN-recognized governments of these countries only control a small part of the country, there is no real way for them to test for the virus or to report official data because the way the international community works is that there is no independence bodies that affirm cases.
That means that there may be a much wider outbreak in many countries where there are ungoverned areas or rebellions. Yemen has seen cases increase from just one to ten, but it appears to be just the tip of the iceberg.
While some countries, using various methods of lockdowns, have appears to keep cases low, such as only 460 report in the Kingdom of Jordan, the Gulf states have seen rapid increases. Saudi Arabia now has 25,459 cases and Qatar has 14,872 while the UAE has 13,599 cases.
