BEIRUT: Lebanon's health minister says the financially troubled Mediterranean country, which has so far managed to contain the coronavirus, is sliding toward a critical stage with a new surge in infections after lockdown restrictions were lifted and the airport reopened.
The recently recorded double and triple digits of new infections were coupled with an increase in untraceable cases, raising concerns that a dangerous spread in the community could follow, Minister of Health Hamad Hassan told The Associated Press.
Lebanon’s early lockdown and strict measures to contain the virus were praised for slowing down the initial spread of the pandemic. Authorities have also aggressively tested, carried out random tests, and swiftly isolated infected areas.
But Lebanon’s crippling economic and financial crisis has proven more difficult to manage. In late April, the authorities began gradually easing weeks-long restrictions that threw tens of thousands out of work; Lebanon's only airport reopened on July 1.
Today, the government doesn't appear ready to again tighten restrictions or impose another full lockdown.
So far, Lebanon has recorded more than 2,900 infections and 41 deaths, including one front-line doctor who died Monday at a hospital in the south, two weeks after contracting COVID-19. Hassan said the late diagnosis is to blame for the death of the 32-year-old physician. Some 150 medical staff have been infected, only a few of them becoming sick.
The reopening of the Beirut airport and the subsequent failure of Lebanese returning from abroad and their relatives to adhere to strict isolation measures caused a spike in infections, Hassan said. Many returning expats visited relatives and attended social gatherings, which helped spread the virus. New cases peaked last week with as high as 170 in one day, from an average of less than 20 a day in previous months.
“The danger of community spread is still possible because the country has opened up,” Hassan said in the interview with the AP late Monday.
Despite a low death rate and low level of hospital bed occupancy, the minister warned that more than 20% of the new infections are untraceable.
“When they are untraceable and I can’t trace the clusters that I need to reach, then I start to worry that we are sliding into stage four,” he said. “We are still in the critical period between stage three to stage four.”
Stage four would necessitate return to more lockdown measures, though it's “still too early” to consider that option, he added.
In the beginning, people stayed home for months, helping contain the spread of virus, Hassan said. Now their needs to live must be considered — a dilemma facing all countries grappling with the slowdown of economic activities amid the virus.
Lebanon’s crisis predates the virus, which has only accelerated poverty and unemployment rates, now at 45% and over 30%, respectively.
Before the coronavirus, Lebanon was already going through its worst economic and financial crisis. A highly indebted government bailed on paying its sovereign debt in March; banks imposed informal capital controls to prevent further drying up of liquidity and foreign currency. Nationwide protests demanded major reforms from a government that has failed to gain wide domestic or international support while talks for assistance from the International Monetary Fund stalled.
The crisis put a strain on resources and threatened fuel supplies, which raised alarm among the country’s hospitals that rely on generators and fuel bought at black market rates. Private and public hospitals warned they may not be able to keep up with the surge in infections; private hospitals threatened to shut down, saying accumulated government debt, banking restrictions and a currency crash are making their operations unsustainable.
Hassan said he is counting on the government to continue to provide for hospitals, adding that a “safety belt” of financing until the end of the year is available to ensure that both private and public hospitals continue to operate.
But he also appealed on the health facilities to put up with the economic crunch Lebanon is facing. He said parliament has approved repaying a chunk of outstanding debts, but the currency crash is deepening the pressure.
“Today all these fears are legitimate. We are living from one day to another,” he said. “We should not scare the citizen, who is already under a lot of psychological and moral stress worrying about his food, social and economic security. Let’s not also add to it by undermining his health safety.”
Members of Lebanon's cash-strapped government have accused political rivals of trying to make it fail by seeking to block international aid. The militant Hezbollah group, which backs the current government, has accused the United States of allegedly stopping foreign currency from reaching Lebanon as a way to pressure the Iran-backed group, along with sanctions.
Hassan said his strategy is to strengthen the public health sector, which had been devastated during the country’s civil war that ended in 1990. Lebanon heavily relies on private hospitals, but public facilities have been at the forefront of efforts to combat the coronavirus.
Hassan said he will use a World Bank loan to equip and prepare public hospitals.
“We must cooperate ... to be able to cross this difficult phase that our nation is going through,” he said.
Minister: Lebanon is nearing critical stage in virus cases
https://arab.news/6zdrn
Minister: Lebanon is nearing critical stage in virus cases
- Lebanon’s early lockdown and strict measures to contain the virus were praised for slowing down the initial spread of the pandemic
Beirut’s Commodore Hotel, a haven for journalists during Lebanon’s civil war, shuts down
- The hotel, located in Beirut’s Hamra district, shut down over the weekend
- Officials have not commented on the decision
BEIRUT: During Lebanon’s civil war, the Commodore Hotel in western Beirut’s Hamra district became iconic among the foreign press corps.
For many, it served as an unofficial newsroom where they could file dispatches even when communications systems were down elsewhere. Armed guards at the door provided some sense of protection as sniper fights and shelling were turning the cosmopolitan city to rubble.
The hotel even had its own much-loved mascot: a cheeky parrot at the bar.
The Commodore endured for decades after the 15-year civil war ended in 1990 — until this week, when it closed for good.
The main gate of the nine-story hotel with more than 200 rooms was shuttered Monday. Officials at the Commodore refused to speak to the media about the decision to close.
Although the country’s economy is beginning to recover from a protracted financial crisis that began in 2019, tensions in the region and the aftermath of the Israel-Hezbollah war that was halted by a tenuous ceasefire in November 2024 are keeping many tourists away. Lengthy daily electricity cuts force businesses to rely on expensive private generators.
The Commodore is not the first of the crisis-battered country’s once-bustling hotels to shut down in recent years.
But for journalists who lived, worked and filed their dispatches there, its demise hits particularly hard.
“The Commodore was a hub of information — various guerrilla leaders, diplomats, spies and of course scores of journalists circled the bars, cafes and lounges,” said Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East correspondent who covered the civil war. “On one occasion (late Palestinian leader) Yasser Arafat himself dropped in to sip coffee with” with the hotel manager’s father, he recalled.
A line to the outside world
At the height of the civil war, when telecommunications were dysfunctional and much of Beirut was cut off from the outside world, it was at the Commodore where journalists found land lines and Telex machines that always worked to send reports to their media organizations around the globe.
Across the front office desk in the wide lobby of the Commodore, there were two teleprinters that carried reports of The Associated Press and Reuters news agencies.
“The Commodore had a certain seedy charm. The rooms were basic, the mattresses lumpy and the meal fare wasn’t spectacular,” said Robert H. Reid, the AP’s former Middle East regional editor, who was among the AP journalists who covered the war. The hotel was across the street from the international agency’s Middle East head office at the time.
“The friendly staff and the camaraderie among the journalist-guests made the Commodore seem more like a social club where you could unwind after a day in one of the world’s most dangerous cities,” Reid said.
Llewellyn remembers that the hotel manager at the time, Yusuf Nazzal, told him in the late 1970s “that it was I who had given him the idea” to open such a hotel in a war zone.
Llewellyn said that during a long chat with Nazzal on a near-empty Middle East Airlines Jumbo flight from London to Beirut in the fall of 1975, he told him that there should be a hotel that would make sure journalists had good communications, “a street-wise and well-connected staff running the desks, the phones, the teletypes.”
During Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and a nearly three-month siege of West Beirut by Israeli troops, journalists used the roof of the hotel to film fighter jets striking the city.
The parrot at the bar
One of the best-known characters at the Commodore was Coco the parrot, who was always in a cage near the bar. Patrons were often startled by what they thought was the whiz of an incoming shell, only to discover that it was Coco who made the sound.
AP’s chief Middle East correspondent Terry Anderson was a regular at the hotel before he was kidnapped in Beirut in 1985 and held for seven years, becoming one of the longest-held American hostages in history.
Videos of Anderson released by his kidnappers later showed him wearing a white T-shirt with the words “Hotel Commodore Lebanon.”
With the kidnapping of Anderson and other Western journalists, many foreign media workers left the predominantly-Muslim western part of Beirut, and after that the hotel lost its status as a safe haven for foreign journalists.
Ahmad Shbaro, who worked at different departments of the hotel until 1988, said the main reason behind the Commodore’s success was the presence of armed guards that made journalists feel secure in the middle of Beirut’s chaos as well as functioning telecommunications.
He added that the hotel also offered financial facilities for journalists who ran out of money. They would borrow money from Nazzal and their companies could pay him back by depositing money in his bank account in London.
Shbaro remembers a terrifying day in the late 1970s when the area of the hotel was heavily shelled and two rooms at the Commodore were hit.
“The hotel was full and all of us, staffers and journalists, spent the night at Le Casbah,” a famous nightclub in the basement of the building, he said.
In quieter times, journalists used to spend the night partying by the pool.
“It was a lifeline for the international media in West Beirut, where journalists filed, ate, drank, slept, and hid from air raids, shelling, and other violence,” said former AP correspondent Scheherezade Faramarzi. “It gained both fame and notoriety,” she said, speaking from the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
The hotel was built in 1943 and kept functioning until 1987 when it was heavily damaged in fighting between Shiite and Druze militiamen at the time. The old Commodore building was later demolished and a new structure was build with an annex and officially opened again for the public in 1996.
But Coco the parrot was no longer at the bar. The bird went missing during the 1987 fighting. Shbaro said it is believed he was taken by one of the gunmen who stormed the hotel.
