Middle East in spotlight with Jordan camp fears and rising cases in Iran

AMMAN－The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, says it is stepping up efforts to curb the spread of COVID-19 among tens of thousands of Syrians in camps in Jordan after the first cases were confirmed last week.

Three cases were reported in the country's largest camp for Syrian refugees, Zaatari, near the border with Syria, and two cases in a smaller camp, Azraq, the agency said.

"The developments this week have obviously been a worrying situation for all, but especially for refugees living in the camps," Dominik Bartsch, the UNHCR representative in Jordan, said on Saturday.

"Crowded spaces and cramped living conditions make social distancing difficult."

The refugees who tested positive for COVID-19 have been sent to an isolation area set up by the Jordanian government, and families of those in contact with them have been quarantined inside the camp, the agency said.

Jordan's Health Ministry is conducting thousands of tests, restricting movement in and out of the camps and training medical staff, Bartsch said.

Iran, the hardest-hit country in the Middle East, reported that the number of infections had reached 399,940 on Saturday.

The official news agency IRNA said Iranian medical scientists would soon start human trials for an anti-coronavirus vaccine after the stage of animal trials has passed.

In India, a single-day rise of 94,372 new confirmed coronavirus cases was registered on Sunday, driving the country's overall tally to 4.75 million, as the number of worldwide cases reached 28.7 million.

Even as infections grow faster in India than anywhere else, the number of people recovering from the virus has also risen sharply. The country's recovery rate stands at 77.77 percent, the Health Ministry said.

The ministry attributed the recovery rate to aggressive testing and prompt surveillance, but experts said India needs to test more because of its huge population. It is now testing more than 1 million people every day.

The country's parliament was expected to resume work on Monday with strict physical distancing after having adjourned in March just before a nationwide lockdown was announced to contain the pandemic.

Physical distancing

Globally, more than 28,760,000 people have been infected by COVID-19, and it has killed more than 920,000, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

In Turkey, the governor of Istanbul has banned boating companies from hosting weddings and similar gatherings as part of new measures to combat the spread of the virus in Istanbul, the country's largest city.

The governor's office also reintroduced a ban on concerts and festivals in open spaces. It said the restrictions were needed because people were not adequately heeding precautions such as physical distancing and confirmed that virus cases had increased.

On Saturday the Health Ministry said 48 more people had died as a result of COVID-19, and there were 1,509 new cases, bringing the country's total death toll in the pandemic to 6,999 and its number of cases to nearly 290,000.

Xinhua - Agencies