Beyond Borders | Myanmar, Six Months After The Coup
Yangon residents line up to get medical oxygen tanks refilled, in Myanmar's lethal COVID-19 surge. More photos from the Myanmar Pressphoto Agency here.
It still feels like COVID-19, now being turbo-charged by the Delta variant in much of Southeast Asia, has frozen time. But yes, it's now half a year since the Myanmar military took over power in that country of over 57 million people.
In this Myanmar-focused issue, we bring you voices from the ground about what life feels like these days ('double trouble', an interviewee says of COVID-
19 and the coup) and insights from an artist who pretends he's on a faraway island to get his creative juices going.
Our chat with Medecins Sans Frontiers explains why the breakdown of health services is a catastrophe - 80% of health services have been from the state. The percentage of COVID-19 tests that turn out positive in Myanmar is very high at 37%, ranking second after Mexico's 38.1% in One World in Data's global tracker.
Our infographics highlight statistics that help illustrate Myanmar's multiple crises - the UN World Food Programme says 90% of government activity has ceased; the World Bank has just projected that its economy will contract by 18% in 2021.
Do check out our photo essay from the Myanmar Pressphoto Agency, a group of fotogs who have soldiered on with news coverage since the coup.
Meantime, hang in there (and that goes for all of us) -
Johanna Son
Founder/Editor - Reporting ASEAN
reportingaseandesk@fastmail.net
1 Myanmar On Our Minds
Six Months After: ’We Only Have Ourselves’ — www.reportingasean.net Six months after the 1 Feb coup, hypervigilance has become a survival skils for many people in Myanmar. But with the junta in power and the National Unity Government trying to get better footing, they are mostly on their own in the 'double trouble' of COVID-19 emergency and the coup crisis.
‘Like Lighthouses, Cartoons Help the Public See the Truth’ — www.reportingasean.net Crises can be fertile ground for art, but they can also chip away at creativity and artists' livelihoods. In this chat with Reporting ASEAN, an artist talks about finding ways to stay inspired, and hopes for the day Myanmar gets past having to wage a revolution..
’The Situation Could Become Critical In Weeks’ — www.reportingasean.net The pandemic in Myanmar is an emergency that is unfolding swiftly, and is much, much worse than what we know at the moment. Reporting ASEAN speaks to Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) to get a better picture of the situation.
Read the Burmese version below:
မြန်မာနိုင်ငံ နှင့် ကိုဗစ်-၁၉ ကပ်ရောဂါ - ရက်သတ္တပတ်အနည်းငယ်အတွင်း ကိုဗစ်-၁၉ ကပ်ရောဂါ အခြေအနေ ပြင်းထန်ဆိုးရွားလာနိုင်ဖွယ် ဖြစ်နေပြီ မြန်မာနိုင်ငံအတွင်း ကိုဗစ်-၁၉ ကပ်ရောဂါဟာ ရုတ်တရက် အရေးပေါ်အန္တရာယ်ကျရောက်မည့် အခြေအနေကို ရောက်ရှိ နေပြီ ဖြစ်တယ်။ လတ်တလော ကျွနှု်ပ်တို့သိရှိထားတဲ့ အခြေအနေတွေထက် အလွန့်အလွန် ပိုမို ဆိုးရွားလာနိုင်ဖွယ်ရှိ နေတယ်။
COVID-19 Disaster Adds to Confluence of Crises Myanmar's pandemic-hit communities are trying to fend for themselves as the country's health system, already crippled after the Feb 1 coup, crumbles under a third outbreak of COVID-19. But the country needs a much stronger response, not to mention a functioning government.
2 Stories In Numbers
