DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The small, neighboring sheikhdoms of Bahrain and Qatar have the world’s highest per capita rates of coronavirus infections. In the two Mideast countries, COVID-19 epidemics initially swept undetected through camps housing healthy and young foreign laborers, studies now show.
In Qatar, a new study found that nearly 60% of those testing positive showed no symptoms at all, calling into question the usefulness of mass temperature checks meant to stop the infected from mingling with others. In Bahrain, authorities put the asymptomatic figure even higher, at 68%.
These results reflect both the wider problems faced by Gulf Arab countries reliant on cheap foreign labor and their relative success in tracking their COVID-19 epidemics, given their oil wealth and authoritarian governments.
Aggressive testing boosted the number of confirmed cases as health officials in Bahrain and Qatar targeted vulnerable labor camps and neighborhoods, where migrant workers from Asia sleep, eat and live up to dozen people per room.
“This is why globally we failed to control, I think, the infection because simply the response has been focused on trying to find cases and isolate them and quarantine their contacts,” said Laith Abu-Raddad, a disease researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine – Qatar. “Now, if most people getting the infection are actually spreading the infection without even knowing it, this really does not actually work.”
