A SCOTS academic has warned that governments around the world will have to take action over the global refugee crisis as coronavirus starts to spread in camps which are already overcrowded and barely habitable.

Already the Ritsona camp in Greece has been placed under quarantine after 20 residents tested positive for coronavirus.

Two cases were also confirmed this week in the Calais migrant community and another in a refugee camp in Dunkirk.

Professor Nasar Meer, a Royal Society of Edinburgh Research Fellow, told The National that refugee camps in Europe, which are relatively small, required a different solution to the much bigger settlements elsewhere around the world.

The first thing governments had to do was recognise the issue. “I think there’s a presumption amongst current state level actors that they can take measures which will address or attempt to address the pandemic amongst large swathes of the population, but that those on the peripheries of society, and I’m specifically thinking about southern Europe here, can almost be kind of quarantined en-masse.

“I think that’s a terrible error because ... that’s really, really difficult to achieve. Those two truisms of public health, that prevention is better than cure and that viruses are socially connected aren’t being heeded.

“So one of the first and most obvious things I think that governments need to do and, working in collaboration especially with Greece in Europe, is to ensure that they have capacity.

“You have to do elementary things like have hand washing stations, triage centres, social distancing and isolation facilities in and around those camps.

“But I suppose more substantially is to disband them and that’s something we can do in Europe because the camps are relatively small.”

Meer said the Moria camp on the island of Lesbos contained about 20,000 people, but they were crammed within one 10th of a kilometre squared – an area the size of 14 football pitches.

“Now, 20,000 people could easily be absorbed into inland Greece or the rest of Europe,” he said. “So I think I think the European camps can be relatively easily absorbed into European states and that requires the EU to act and offer incentives. For Greece, that may well be offering debt relief, which I think the EU could do very easily.”

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Outside Europe, Meer said the problem was much more serious, and not just in the Middle East.

“Of course there’s the swelling Idlib province [in Syria], the Zaatari camp in Jordan and the Bekaa Valley camp in Lebanon,” he said.

“But in north America, in northern Mexico, there’s a camp at Ciudad Juarez, a relatively new phenomenon but it has all the characteristics of a makeshift refugee camp where there’s no organised sanitation, no clean running water, it’s very ad hoc, prime material for an outbreak of infection, although localised for them.

“And then of course outside the Middle East you have Cox’s Bazar, where the majority of people fleeing genocide in Burma (Myanmar) went. There were around 850,000 Rohingya refugees and there are others too, so that’s a big camp.”

Once again, there was no organised sanitation, or clean running water, and he said a different strategy was needed to approach the problem.

“I think that’s a role for international charities like the International Rescue Committee to work to almost bypass the state, to work locally with the NGOs on the ground, who have the local knowledge, the expertise and who know about infection and prevention control and can speak the language.

“I don’t think states are actually strong enough to take the kind of actions required on that level, so that’s really a place for international, transnational organisations to show their mettle.

“This is the moment for them step up to this.”

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