Bashar al Assad tests positive for COVID-19
10th March 2021
A video report from
BBC News explores the life of two Syrian women 10 years after protest calling for freedom began across the country. Bashar al Assad’s regime responded to the protests in force, leading to increasing violence and civil war.
Reuters covers a new report from the International Committee of the Red Cross that highlights the high price young Syrians have endured over the last 10 years. The report notes that almost eight in 10 young Syrians have reported struggling to afford food and other basic necessities, with close to half losing their income because of the decade-long conflict. The Red Cross regional director for the Middle East said, “One of the shocking results of this survey is that we realised that 50% of Syrians had friends or a family member who was killed … one out of six Syrians had one of their parents either killed or wounded.”
On March 11 2020, the World Health Organization declared that the COVID-19 public health emergency had become a pandemic: 114 countries were affected, there were 121,500 confirmed cases and more than 4,000 people had succumbed to the virus.
One year on, we have now seen 115 million confirmed cases globally and more than 2.5 million deaths from COVID-19.
“Pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly,” said the Director-General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on that day in 2020. But in the year since that announcement, the fates of many countries have depended on how leaders have chosen their words.
The impact of the pandemic was unprecedented and all governments faced challenges dealing with a severe but highly unpredictable threat to the lives of their citizens. And some governments responded better than others.
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