Day 42 and in Qatar things have still not settled. Cases are up-and-down, 600+ one day, 700+ another. Today was 951 new cases for a total of 17,142. It's a lot given the size of the population. A website called worldometers has been keeping track and I sorted their table by "Total Cases per 1m population" (click on the photo for a clearer view):
Qatar is fifth on the table and the only ones above it are small countries with fewer than 700,000 people (fewer than 100,000 if we remove Luxembourg), where even a handful of cases could cause the per million number to skyrocket. I expect Qatar to be fourth on the table tomorrow. However deaths in Qatar are stable at 12, one of the lowest mortality rates in the world.
The virus is spreading mostly through worker dormitories and neighbourhoods, the crowded conditions cause the virus to spread rapidly. Qatar is focusing on contact testing so as they discover cases they test the people they are in contact with, or even entire dormitories. As Qatar tests them they are finding around 25-35% of people tested have the virus.
I think because the majority of cases are workers in compounds/dorms some people here are getting a false sense of security and figuring they will be fine since the virus is concentrated in certain areas. People seem to forget just how ubiquitous these workers are in Qatar. Yes they might live in a compounds or dormitories but during the day they're out working in malls, restaurants, parks, offices, construction sites, everywhere. And given the young age of most workers many of them will not have any symptoms of the virus, yet they can still unknowingly spread it. One should not be reckless and assume it's low risk because the virus is spreading amongst South Asian workers. Qataris are getting the virus as well.
Qatar is now implementing a random sample testing of the population. About 2500 people will be contacted by the Ministry to show up at a health centre for a survey and then be tested for the virus (this can apparently be done from your car). This is being done likely as a measure to see if the virus is in the population unknown to the contact tracers. It's a good idea and random sampling should continue.
In other coronavirus news India is going to allow special flights into the country in order to repatriate Indian stranded abroad. I think at the moment India's not allowing commercial flights into the country leaving a lot of people who want to return stranded in other countries. The Indian government expects to repatriate about 14,000 people over the next week and there will be two flights from Qatar. It's a nice gesture but it's a drop in the bucket -- in Qatar alone 40,000 Indians have registered with the embassy to be repatriated. In the UAE it is nearly 200,000.
Stay safe everyone!
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