Comparative Civilizations
COVID-19 is the name that the World Health Organization has decided to give to the recent disease that has taken the world by storm. Despite not having any reported cases yet, the coronavirus has still affected Yemen in many different ways. Yemen recently had the world's largest cholera outbreak known to man. Though the disease can be easily prevented with clean water or vaccines, the health system in Yemen is crippled by the ongoing war between internationally-backed government forces and Houthi rebels. Many fear that if the coronavirus takes hold of Yemen, the results will be devastating.
Yemen's health system is in shambles. Based on nearly 200 interviews, reports document 120 attacks against medical facilities across 20 of Yemen's 22 governorates between March 2015, when Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates started a war there with U.S. backing, and the end of 2018 (Yemens War-Battered). Large amounts of aerial assaults and bomb raids were launched against medical facilities by both the Saudi and Emirati coalition and Houthi rebels alike. 46 of the attacks on these facilities were mortar strikes by Houthi rebels or their allies, with some being an attempt to gain control of these facilities. Years of infrastructure damage, including attacks against hospitals or other medical facilities, have left the country prone to illnesses. Yemen has recently been affected by the largest cholera outbreak in the world, with 2,263,304 cholera cases in Yemen and 3,767 deaths related to the illness since 2017 (The Forgotten Epidemic). Yemen was barely able to make it through this easily prevented disease, let alone a pandemic. Only 51% of Yemen's health facilities are even functional, and there are only two testing sites, which are in Sanaa and Aden. If Yemen had an outbreak, it would not be able...
