Corona measures have been part of everyday life in Germany for a year and a half. Life without her seems like a vague memory. Our author experienced the opposite in Syria. There, compliance with the protective measures can have unpleasant consequences.
Beirut / Latakia – If you want to enter a parallel world in 2021, you don’t need a time travel portal. You don’t even have to travel very far to get there. At the airport in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, I step out of the terminal building into the heat. I take off my mask and have no idea that I won’t be wearing it for a long time. “No mask,” says the driver waiting for me in the parking lot. I get in the car, puzzled. My destination: the Syrian port city of Latakia.
The drive from Beirut to Latakia takes three hours, northwards along the Mediterranean coast. We pass a street protest near Beirut. Men, many of them barefoot, block a gas station because gasoline prices are so high and economic conditions are so bad. Someone is firing volleys into the air from a machine gun. I realize that this is my first time hearing this crackle in real life, not in a movie or on the news. We cross the border between Lebanon and Syria, where the driver walks back and forth between dusty buildings with a pile of immigration papers.
It is 11 p.m. when the car swings over the gravel road to my accommodation in Latakia. At the edge of the road there are countless unfinished buildings, meatless skeletons made of concrete that await better times. In addition, half-finished high-rise buildings whose residents have already moved in and which are connected to the power grid by means of temporary cable bundles. People are pragmatic in Syria.
“There is no Corona in Syria”: Life without protective measures and restrictions
Latakia is 350 kilometers from the capital Damascus and 180 kilometers from Aleppo. The city is the center of the Syrian Alawis – a religiously moderate minority within Islam. Alawites drink alcohol, celebrate Christmas, the women do not wear headscarves. IS sees the Alawites as mortal enemies, but fails to penetrate into the region. There have been no fights and attacks in Latakia for years.
Heavy machines have dug furrows in the road. Rubble piles up to the left and right. The air is still warm and humid when I get out of the car. My host holds out his sweaty hand to greet me – it would be my first physical contact outside of my close family in a year and a half. Noticing my hesitation, he grabs my hand and shakes it. “There is no Corona in Syria,” he says with a clatter of laughter. Serious? Irony? Difficult to read.
Mask requirement, restrictions, AHA rules – everyday life in Germany is hardly imaginable without these measures. In other countries that I have visited since the travel restrictions were eased, even stricter rules sometimes apply: In Greece, Spain, in Dubai, where high fines are threatened if the mask requirement is not observed outdoors.
But in Syria, Corona is suddenly very far away. Here you have other things in mind. For example, that the power went out for two hours every two hours since the supply was restricted due to US sanctions. To go to the bathroom in the dark, you need a flashlight. At two o’clock in the morning it’s that time again: the power goes out. Likewise the fan, which has at least provided a little cooling. And so toss and turn in the stifling heat until I finally fall asleep.
Before we go shopping the next morning, I ask my hosts: “Don’t we have to take our masks with us?” Loud laughter. “There is no Corona in Syria,” shouts one of the men and shakes his head in mock indignation.
Nobody pays attention to their distance, nobody wears a mask
Again and again I see rickety minibuses, built in 1990 and older, with almost 20 passengers crammed into them. For 225 Syrian lira, the equivalent of 15 cents, they transport people through the city. The bodies pressed together, they sit on the benches in the stuffy interior. Where there is room for three, a fourth squeezes in, half crouching because his pelvis no longer fits into the gap. Nobody is following the protective measures recommended by the government. Nobody pays attention to distance. One can imagine how the lateral thinker Germany would applaud this ignorance.
The RKI has classified Syria as a risk area with a particularly high risk of infection since January 2021. According to official Syrian information, there have been only 25,930 cases of infection and 1,911 corona deaths since the beginning of the pandemic – with a population of 17 million. For comparison: Greece (10 million inhabitants) reports 517,000 infections and 13,000 deaths.
Small shops are lined up in the center of Latakia. Before: men on plastic chairs sucking on their hookahs and blowing clouds of steam into the air. A jumble of advertising signs, displays, worn awnings. Passers-by push past. A symphony of chaos that has its charm. Nobody wears face masks, not even the salespeople in the shops. I am told that anyone who wears a mask makes themselves suspicious. The others would then whisper, change the side of the street. “Masks are embarrassing,” says my host. People might think you are actually sick.
In a jewelry store, I look at the display. Because there is air in the little shop, sweat runs down my back. The heat is almost unbearable. Five men are in the approximately 20 square meter room to protect him from robberies. The seller takes jewelry from a drawer and spreads them on the counter. He coughs several times. A dry, choking sound. I involuntarily take a step back, but I don’t get very far in the narrow corridor. The only thing left for me to do is to quietly evoke the effectiveness of my Biontech vaccination.
Quarantine would be social suicide
Anyone who develops symptoms here would never think of isolating themselves. I learn that it is not customary in Syria to be tested for the corona virus anyway. What for? Quarantine would be social suicide. Not visiting relatives for two weeks? That would be embarrassing. What’s wrong with that, people would ask. Would you like to be absent from work for two weeks? Unthinkable in a country where the average monthly wage is currently 30 euros. Even before the pandemic, the country had plunged into a deep economic crisis due to war and sanctions.
When I finally pass a lonely dispenser with disinfectant in front of a grocery store, I look around. Is anyone watching me? I stealthily pump two blobs of gel into my hands and rub it in unobtrusively. It seems to me that I am doing something that is forbidden. That man in front – the one with the narrowed eyes – is he staring at me? I move on quickly.
At sunset we stroll along the beach promenade of Latakia. Corniche, that’s what the locals call it – a term they adopted from the French occupiers. Sweaty bodies push their way through the crowd – there are crowds like at a folk festival. Keep distance? No chance.
A youngster is hitting a beating Luke, surrounded by a dozen other thugs. Thing. Thing. Thing. The youngsters laugh, hoot and fool around. In my hometown of Stuttgart such gatherings are called “migrant hordes”. A problem that has worsened since the pandemic, as commentators complain on social networks.
In Latakia, Syria, this is the normal way of life. People escape the heat of their homes in the evenings. They brought tables and chairs. Drink, eat, smoke Shisha. They have their picnic in the middle of the sidewalk and don’t let the traffic on the busy street disturb them.
The actual extent of the pandemic in Syria is unclear
“You live in chaos” – that’s what a friend from Germany had said to my hostess when she was visiting Latakia many years ago. She said: “As a German, I wouldn’t be able to stand it for more than a few weeks.” You can imagine that this exuberant public life is difficult to narrow down. At the beginning of the pandemic, curfews went into effect in Syria. They were repealed in June 2020 – and have never been reintroduced since then.
Since then, life in Syria just seems to go on. As if there was no pandemic at all. How many victims Covid-19 actually claimed remains uncertain. Only rumors get outside. Foreign media cite alleged eyewitnesses and posts from social networks. It’s about overcrowded hospitals and dramatic death rates. There is no evidence.
The pandemic apparently hit the workers in the Syrian health care system in particular. “Many colleagues I knew personally were carried away by Corona,” a doctor from Latakia tells me. In August 2020, the Syrian authorities reported that 76 clinic employees had died of Covid-19 within one month. There are no current figures on this.
The situation improved in 2021, says another doctor who works in a clinic in Latakia. “We currently have few corona patients on the ward. There are also no more deaths among medical staff. ”The doctor leans back, folds his hands over his round belly and closes his eyes – as if he had to recover from the exertion of the past few months. He looks a bit like a Buddha figure. How fitting that Alawites believe in rebirth. “Everything is fine now,” says the doctor. “Hamdullah”. Praise be to God.
Back at my accommodation there is Zaatar for dinner. Ground wild thyme with sesame seeds mixed in olive oil. In addition: Macdous, these are eggplants filled with peppers and nuts and pickled in olive oil. And Shanglish – dried goat cheese that tastes like stable and goat skin. Before serving, it is doused with plenty of olive oil. “We eat very healthy, with lots of natural fats,” says my hostess as she tears off a piece of her flatbread and dips it in Zaatar. She smiles, filled with almost childish pride. “That is why we are immune to many diseases. And that’s why there is no Corona in Syria. “
Second Class Vaccines? AstraZeneca from India, Sinopharm, Sputnik V
International scientists prefer to rely on vaccines to fight the pandemic. Vaccination is also carried out in Syria, including with AstraZeneca. The EU has let its contract with the AstraZeneca supplier expire due to severe side effects and massive delivery problems. The vaccine is now being produced on a large scale in Pune, India, for developing and emerging countries.
Also in use in Syria: the Chinese vaccine Sinopharm, whose effectiveness there were recently great doubts. For example, Indonesia and Vietnam have health care employees re-vaccinated with Moderna and Biontech – hundreds of employees had previously died of Covid-19 despite the Chinese vaccination. Ally Russia’s vaccine, Sputnik V, is also being shipped to Syria. To date, the European Medicines Agency Ema has refused to approve the vaccine due to a lack of reliable scientific data.
After dinner we sit on the balcony to cool off in the light breeze. The power went out again and with it the air conditioning. The call of the muezzin resounds from the nearby mosque. It is visited by devout Sunnis who make up the majority in Latakia, as everywhere in Syria. There are also churches for the 14 percent Christians who live in the city.
The shell skeletons slumber peacefully in the sunset. It’s my last day in Syria and I’ve gotten used to this parallel world, in which the pandemic seems to be just a distant whisper. “There is no Corona in Syria” – I never heard a sentence more often than this during my stay.
The next morning the driver picks me up and takes me back to Beirut. In front of the airport building, I put on a mouth and nose protector for the first time in a week. It feels familiar, relieving. By L. Paic.
