Treating COVID patients in secret Myanmar clinics

Treating COVID patients in secret Myanmar clinics

KAYAH, Myanmar: A handful of Myanmar nurses hiding from the junta have been running makeshift clinics to treat COVID patients and resistance fighters with medicine smuggled past military checkpoints. With bags packed, they are always ready to flee as healthcare workers find themselves at the forefront of a civil disobedience movement against the February coup and a crackdown on dissent that has killed more than 1,300, according to a local monitoring group.

A boycott of government institutions has left many hospitals without staff and the junta has arrested and killed scores of protesting health workers, rights groups say. Aye Naing-not her real name-left her job in a public hospital soon after the coup and in June began volunteering in Kayah state in Myanmar’s east, where the military and anti-coup fighters have clashed repeatedly.

“When the fighting starts, we have to run and hide in the jungle,” she told AFP at a clinic housed at a school abandoned because of fighting near the town of Demoso. After a devastating COVID wave in June and July-where new daily cases peaked at 40,000 — the junta has said new infections are down to around 150 per day, and that the Omicron variant is yet to