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Yeah, it was a perfect storm.
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Many of the world's healthcare systems are struggling with the pandemic, obviously.
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But among industrialized countries, there's one place where a combination of factors including the collapse of their economy, political instability, migration and an unrelated massive disaster have merged to hit their hospitals in a way that may have no equal.
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That country is Lebanon.
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Omar al Masri sees it every day.
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He's a Red Cross responder there.
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The image that is always on my mind is just the hospital beds that are completely full.
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Honestly, the the scenario in itself, it is just I'm not going to say it's It's scary fee a bit fee fi risk that's being taken.
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But just saying hospitals truly full with patients that are on on ventilators on oxygen, it's It's just a name.
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It puts you down at times, you know, the hospitals are full here in a way that other countries fear may happen to their own.
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Some simply can't take anymore.
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Reuters heard one story of a resident who spent hours calling hospitals trying to find a bed for her grandfather.
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When that failed, she apparently took matters into her own hands and bought her own oxygen tank and put him on a stretcher outside a hospital where a doctor snaked an extension cord through a window for him.
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But this is bigger than just covert infections.
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Lebanon's economic crisis actually started several months before the pandemic in 2019.
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Now it's in total financial collapse.
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And then there were the events of August.
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Okay, the massive explosion accident that hit Beirut, one of the biggest non nuclear detonations ever recorded in which 200 people died in leveled city blocks.
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The shock waves struck hospitals in the city already dealing with the pandemic.
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The political fallout from this almost immediate violent protests, the resignation of their government.
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Reuters has also previously reported that hundreds of doctors have recently left Lebanon migrating to other countries.
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On at one hospital, doctors told us that about 40% of their staff were either sick with co vid themselves or in isolation.
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It's all too much for the health care system.
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Toe hand Nadeem Kahwaji is another first responder like Masari.
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No, that's the reality.
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You can't do anything.
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We have to adapt.
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Mr.
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It's not that hospitals don't want to take anyone in there not able Thio several mustache.
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We drive from one hospital to another, trying to find beds.
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There was one time where we had to go through four hospitals until we found a place the fourth one worked E Arabia Mission.
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Where does this all end for Lebanon?
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The caretaker government says it's doing everything it can.
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Some medical workers we spoke with believe it's acted too slowly and not aggressively enough.
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But it has recently ordered a 24 hour curfew toe last until at least January 25th.
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It's also secured millions of vaccine doses, including through the World Health Organization.
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Georgia's Juve Loken is the head of critical care.
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At Beirut's ST George Hospital.
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We asked him, Does he still have hope?
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If you have no hope, you can't continue.
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No one can.