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  • Yeah, it was a perfect storm.

  • Many of the world's healthcare systems are struggling with the pandemic, obviously.

  • 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.

  • That country is Lebanon.

  • Omar al Masri sees it every day.

  • He's a Red Cross responder there.

  • The image that is always on my mind is just the hospital beds that are completely full.

  • 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.

  • But just saying hospitals truly full with patients that are on on ventilators on oxygen, it's It's just a name.

  • 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.

  • Some simply can't take anymore.

  • Reuters heard one story of a resident who spent hours calling hospitals trying to find a bed for her grandfather.

  • 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.

  • But this is bigger than just covert infections.

  • Lebanon's economic crisis actually started several months before the pandemic in 2019.

  • Now it's in total financial collapse.

  • And then there were the events of August.

  • 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.

  • The shock waves struck hospitals in the city already dealing with the pandemic.

  • The political fallout from this almost immediate violent protests, the resignation of their government.

  • Reuters has also previously reported that hundreds of doctors have recently left Lebanon migrating to other countries.

  • On at one hospital, doctors told us that about 40% of their staff were either sick with co vid themselves or in isolation.

  • It's all too much for the health care system.

  • Toe hand Nadeem Kahwaji is another first responder like Masari.

  • No, that's the reality.

  • You can't do anything.

  • We have to adapt.

  • Mr.

  • It's not that hospitals don't want to take anyone in there not able Thio several mustache.

  • We drive from one hospital to another, trying to find beds.

  • There was one time where we had to go through four hospitals until we found a place the fourth one worked E Arabia Mission.

  • Where does this all end for Lebanon?

  • The caretaker government says it's doing everything it can.

  • Some medical workers we spoke with believe it's acted too slowly and not aggressively enough.

  • But it has recently ordered a 24 hour curfew toe last until at least January 25th.

  • It's also secured millions of vaccine doses, including through the World Health Organization.

  • Georgia's Juve Loken is the head of critical care.

  • At Beirut's ST George Hospital.

  • We asked him, Does he still have hope?

  • If you have no hope, you can't continue.

  • No one can.

Yeah, it was a perfect storm.

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