Via CNN: Yemen coronavirus: Death rates Aden could exceed its wartime fatalities. Excerpt:
Ghasan Saleh starts digging graves at the break of dawn to prepare for the dead bodies that will come in droves. Two men in white hazmat suits appear atop an approaching pickup truck. They hastily drop a corpse into a hole and cover it with dirt.
The health workers come and go in near-silence. Fear of infection means there are no mourners for those suspected to have died from Covid-19.
The cycle of digging and abrupt funerals continues under the blistering sun and suffocating humidity of Aden, the seat of power of the UN-recognized government in war-torn Yemen.
The Al Radwan cemetery has quickly expanded over the past few months, with new graves creeping closer to the residential buildings that border it. "You can see my digging machine," says Saleh. "Just now I dug 20 graves."
Local medical authorities say that death rates in Aden are soaring this year, despite a relative lull in a war that ravaged the place in previous years.
In the first half of May, the city recorded 950 deaths -- nearly four times as many as the 251 deaths in the whole month of March, according to a Ministry of Health report.
Those 950 deaths in two weeks in May represent nearly half the number of casualties the city suffered in all of 2015, when the country's civil war was raging.
Back then Aden was devastated by heavy fighting, its streets blasted by rockets and its houses peppered with bullets. Now the city's biggest killers are silent.
On top of Covid-19, there's also a mosquito-transmitted virus outbreak, known as Chikungunya virus, and more than 100,000 known cholera cases across the nation. Many malnutrition centers and hospitals have closed due to funding shortfalls and doctors' concerns about their personal safety from coronavirus. Flash floods this spring destroyed the city's power grid.
"Yemen has faced wars and cannot handle three pandemics, economic collapse and a war and the coronavirus," Dr. Ishraq Al-Subei, the health official responsible for the response to the disease told CNN.
The official Covid-19 death toll in southern Yemen stands at only 127. Health workers say they don't know what the actual number is, because of low testing capacity. But the huge surge in deaths in Aden is being seen as a warning of worse to come, as the health sector becomes overwhelmed and more people die of treatable diseases.
