With their lungs already sick from Covid, many patients could not resist the acrid smoke of the fire, which spread very quickly between the rooms and corridors. So in a few minutes around last midnight the horror hit the Al-Khatib hospital near the Dyala bridge, one of the great Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad. Before noon, the very serious dimensions of the disaster were evident to doctors, nurses, firefighters and relatives of the inmates: over 82 dead, at least 110 injured, the entire hospital destroyed by flames. And deaths are on the rise. “Probably many of those who have inhaled the smoke will not survive. We also have many serious cases of people jumped from high floors to escape the flames, ”explain the spokespersons of the Ministry of Health.
At the origin of the fire it would be the accidental explosion of one of the oxygen cylinders in the intensive care unit, where serious cases among those affected by the virus are hospitalized. A nightmare for anyone. The flames hit other donuts. The explosions have become bombs. Intubated patients quickly passed from induced coma to death. “I managed to drag my brother out onto the street. Then I tried to go up to the upper floors not yet hit by the flames, but there was a thick smoke. I saw a 19-year-old girl who was dying, ”one of the witnesses, Ahmed Zaki, tells local reporters.
For Baghdad one tragedy among many. For many years, after the American invasion that brought down Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, terrorism, attacks and violence were the order of the day. In 2006 it had reached monthly averages of 3,000 deaths due to internal civil war. But for some years the situation has stabilized. Today the biggest problem is the virulence of the pandemic and the people’s protests against corruption, government inefficiency and unemployment. Already ravaged by decades of conflict, the national health system has been brought to its knees by Covid. Still according to the data provided by the Ministry of Health, the deaths from Covid to date would be 15,257 and the cases of officially registered sick people would exceed one million.
But local press sources have long argued that in reality the figures are much higher, the country simply does not have the structures to detect and treat them. For a few weeks, China has sent hundreds of thousands of doses of its vaccine, but many are reluctant to use it. Prime Minister Mustafa al Kadhimi suffered an investigation has been ordered and the Minister of Health, Hassan al Tamimi, has already been suspended. It is not excluded that this latest incident could rekindle the riots that began in autumn 2019 and that the measures against the pandemic had helped to quell.
April 25, 2021 (change April 25, 2021 | 5:30 pm)
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