DUBAI, UAE – After opening on New Year’s Eve festivities, Dubai is now being blamed by several countries for spreading the coronavirus abroad, even while wondering about the city-state capacity to handle peaks recorded in virus cases.
The government’s Dubai media office says the sheikh is doing his best to fight the pandemic, although he has repeatedly refused to answer questions from The Associated Press about his hospital capacity.
“After a year of pandemic management, we can say with confidence that the current situation is under control and we plan to increase any capacity of the healthcare system in case of need,” he said.
However, Nasser al-Shaikh, a former Dubai finance minister, offered a different assessment on Twitter on Thursday and called on authorities to take control of a number of spiraling cases.
“Leadership bases its decisions on the team’s recommendations, the wrong recommendations that endanger human souls and negatively affect our society,” he wrote, adding that “our economy requires accountability.”
Dubai, known for its long-haul carrier Emirates, the world’s tallest building and its beaches and bars, became one of the first travel destinations in July to be described as open for business.. The move led to the bleeding of its crucial tourism and real estate sectors after blockades and curfews became craters in its economy.
As tourism resumed, daily numbers of coronavirus cases grew slowly, but most remained stable during the fall.
But then came New Year’s Eve: a great attraction for travelers from countries that otherwise shut down the virus that they partied without masks in bars and yachts.. Over the past 17 days, the UAE as a whole has reported daily records of coronavirus cases as the lines at Dubai’s test facilities grow.
In Israel, more than 900 travelers returning from Dubai have been infected with the coronavirus, according to the military, which conducts contact tracking. The returnees created a chain of infections of more than 4,000 people, he said.
Tens of thousands of Israelis had flocked to the UAE since the two countries normalized relations in September. The expert of the Israeli Ministry of Health, Dra. Sharon Alroy-Preis, was quoted by Canal 13 TV as a complaint in a call with other officials that a few weeks of travel had been more deadly than decades of not having relations with the Arab nation.
Since late December, Israel has demanded that those from the UAE enter quarantine for two weeks. Later, Israel closed its main international airport until the end of the month due to the increase in cases.
In the UK, tabloids have splashed on shots of influential British bikini-claders partying in Dubai as the country fought blockades trying to control the virus. Britain in mid-January closed a travel corridor in Dubai that had allowed travelers to skip quarantine in what was described as a significant acceleration in the number of cases imported from the UAE.
“International travel, right now, should not happen unless absolutely necessary,” Health Secretary Matt Hancock told the BBC this week. “There are no parties in Paris or weekends in Dubai. That doesn’t work and, in most cases, it’s against the law. “
Meanwhile, mutated strains of the coronavirus have been linked to Dubai. The United Kingdom on Friday instituted a travel ban banning direct flights to the UAE due to the spread of a South African variant of the coronavirus.
Denmark has already discovered a traveler from Dubai who tested positive for the South African variant, the first such discovery. Like Britain, Danish celebrities traveled similarly to Dubai on New Year’s Eve.
In the Philippines, health authorities say they discovered a British strain infecting a Filipino who made a business trip to Dubai on December 27th. He returned to the Philippines on January 7 and tested positive.
“I had no exposure to a confirmed case before leaving for Dubai,” the Philippine Department of Health said. Since then, Philippine authorities have uncovered at least 16 more cases of the British variant, including two from Lebanon.
As nearly 4,000 cases of coronavirus were reported daily, Dubai has fired the head of its government health agency without explanation. He stopped live entertainment at bars, stopped non-essential surgeries, limited the size of the wedding and ordered gyms to increase the space between those who worked. It now also requires coronavirus testing for all those who fly to your airport.
The UAE had set its hopes on mass vaccinations, with Abu Dhabi distributing a Chinese vaccine to Sinopharm and Dubai offering Pfizer-BioNTech inoculation. The United Arab Emirates claims to have given 2.8 million doses so far, ranking among the most important countries in the world.
However, now people like Al-Shaikh are questioning Dubai’s ability to handle growing cases. Hospitals contacted by the AP largely referred questions to the Dubai government, which has repeatedly refused to comment. The German Saudi hospital in Dubai responded by saying it “expected to read the actual news” without detailing it.
Dr. Santosh Kumar Sharma, medical director of Dubai’s Royal NMC Hospital, told the AP “the number of cases (increases)” with more than half of the beds occupied by coronavirus patients.
The World Health Organization said that before the pandemic, the UAE had about 13,250 hospital beds for a country of more than 9 million people. He said Dubai and the UAE’s northern emirates built field hospitals amid the 5,000-bed pandemic, and that Abu Dhabi built more.
But Dubai closed its 3,000-bed field hospital in July, the same day it reopened tourism. Both Dubai and the UAE Ministry of Health are now announcing nurses on Instagram.
“The sad thing is that since January 2020 great efforts have been made for us to come and mine them with our own hands,” al-Shaikh wrote. “What makes things worse is the lack of transparency.”
Still, it came after the UAE’s autocratic government told those concerned earlier this week to “refrain from questioning the efforts of all those who have worked to contain this pandemic.”
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Associated Press writers Josef Federman in Jerusalem and Isabel DeBre in Dubai, UAE, contributed to this report.