Thread by @Stone_SkyNews

For weeks, there’ve been warnings about what might happen when #Coronavirus reaches #Yemen.
It is now officially spreading inside the country. @SkyNews has filmed images of graves being dug at a worrying pace & we’ve spoken to @jnbeuze - the head of the @UNHCRYemen [thread]

.@jnbeuze told @SkyNews that the presence of #COVID19 in #Yemen + the impact the virus is having on the economies of wealthy donor countries presents a devastating DUAL BLOW for the country.
He warns that 3.6m displaced people + 280,000 refugees will lose their aid.

More than 24 million Yemenis - 80% of the population - are in need of humanitarian assistance after 6 years of civil war between Saudi-backed government forces & #Houthi rebels aligned to Iran. Half of health facilities are dysfunctional; nearly a 1/4 districts have no doctors.

In the south, controlled by government forces, there is more openness about the extent of #coronavirus.
In Aden, in the past week alone, about 500 people have died with corona-like symptoms, representing a significant spike.
A hint of the crisis is clear at the Radhwan cemetery.

The roads out of #Aden tell the story of this country. Each of the destroyed houses represents a family either dead or displaced. The @UN estimates that the conflict has killed more than 100,000 people.

Thousands and thousands of Internally Displaced People (IDPs) live in camps, run by @UNHCRYemen and others. Some of these projects will now be forced to shut down as @jnbeuze has warned.

“How we can face this struggle? I don’t know.” Dr Hamdan Bajary from Sana’a’s Al-Thawrah General Hospital told @SkyNews when we were able to talk to him last month. “We haven’t any facilities. We haven’t any material sufficient to face this struggle, to face this disaster...”

Yet even in this hopelessness, or maybe because of it, we found remarkable ingenuity.
Our team found a young medical engineer in a dusty back room of a hospital in Hajjah making makeshift #CPAP machines & thermometers.
Have a watch: news.sky.com/video/coronavi…

Read the full @skynews report on #Yemen and #Coronavirus here: news.sky.com/story/coronavi…

🎥 Watch our full report on #Yemen’s struggle with #Covid_19 and so much more here

Médecins Sans Frontières (@MSF) deputy operations manager for Yemen, Marc Schakal, has written an opinion piece for @SkyNews - he says the arrival of #COVID__19 into #Yemen is ‘uniquely scary’ news.sky.com/story/yemen-ha…

Putting together a report on #Yemen is tricky at the best of times. Even harder when we can’t travel. But thanks to our local colleagues - @ahmedbaider1 and his team - we were able to put Yemen at the top of the news agenda for an evening. news.sky.com/story/coronavi…