Crowded Camps Await the Coronavirus

COVID-19’s arrival in refugee camps will present a “nightmare within a nightmare,”The Washington Post reports.
 
Refugee camps’ isolation has delayed COVID-19’s arrival so far, but once it get inside, there’s no such thing as “social distancing.”
 
In Jerusalem’s al-Shati camp, ~86,000 Palestinians are packed into the .25-square-mile space—some 12 to an apartment. Sanitation, clean water, and health care were scarce well before the pandemic. WHO supply routes to Gaza that usually take 2 days now take 2 weeks.
 
From Syria to Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Greece, and Venezuela, and the US-Mexico border, the displaced face similarly dire circumstances.
 
Bangladesh has confirmed its first cases, threatening 1 million+ Rohingya refugees crowded in unsanitary camps—and halting any repatriation plans indefinitely, Asia Times reports. Another challenge: The legal questions raised by relocating infected refugees to hospitals outside the camps.