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Here are the latest figures on COVID-19 as of Saturday, May 16:

Future plans unclear after Health Ministry pulls ‘co-existing with COVID-19’ strategy from website

The Health Ministry withdrew a plan on Friday that laid out three phases of a strategy for “coexisting with COVID-19.” The withdrawal of the plan looks like another false step in what has become an increasingly muddled response to COVID-19. 

Messaging around the capacity at quarantine hospitals — and the use of chest and fever hospitals as isolation facilities — likewise remained obscure over the weekend, after the Doctors Syndicate raised concerns about a build-up of patients last week. The Health Ministry’s strategy, which was published in the early hours of Thursday morning, set out measures to be taken during the period of “coexisting with COVID-19,” a catchphrase that has been thrown around by officials for several weeks as a byword for plans to relax the lockdown.

Temperature checks were to be required for everybody entering government buildings or taking the metro and trains, according to the plan’s first phase, which also required all citizens to wear face masks at all times in public. Business owners were expected to place hygiene facilities at their entrances, and to ensure rules were in place to restrict overcrowding. Cinemas, theatres, cafes and all other leisure and entertainment venues (except for malls) were intended to remain closed during phase one, which the plan said would remain in place until a consistent drop in the number of cases had been registered for more than two weeks. 

The Health Ministry then laid out measures for phase two — which would continue for 28 days — and would maintain most of the characteristics of phase one while allowing restaurants to re-open at 50 percent capacity.

Phase three was loosely defined as the “continued reduced measures” phase, and would remain in effect long term until other measures were enacted by the government, or until the World Health Organization reduces the global risk level for COVID-19. 

The plan was taken down from the Health Ministry’s website shortly after it was published. Sources who spoke to Al-Shorouk on Friday stated that the document was pulled since it had not yet been reviewed by the Cabinet’s Crisis Committee, which reserved the right to make any amendments it deemed necessary. 

Confusion likewise mounted this weekend over the status of quarantine hospitals across the country, after the Doctors Syndicate raised the alarm about capacity last week, sending a letter to the president and the Cabinet on May 13 which claimed that doctors who had contracted COVID-19 were facing severe delays preventing their admittance to quarantine hospitals due to a build-up of patients at the hospitals.  

In earlier statements, the Health Ministry had said that it would plan to close the quarantine hospitals currently operating in Egypt by mid-June, and bring Egypt’s chest and fever hospitals in as dedicated quarantine facilities instead. While the Cabinet issued a Friday statement denying reports that Egypt’s dedicated quarantine facilities were full, a source who spoke to Mada Masr after attending the Health Ministry’s briefing on fever hospitals said that fever and chest hospitals would be converted into quarantine hospitals due to “the failure of the [Health Ministry’s] preventive medicine unit to handle the influx of cases.”

Government looks to absorb Gulf returnees into national projects, as repatriation swells already struggling labor market

Egyptian laborers in the Gulf, who have long been a key driver of dollar remittances, are to be integrated into Egypt’s domestic labor force.

“Ministers of planning, immigration: Alternative jobs to be offered to repatriated Egyptian workers,” reads a headline from the party-affiliated Al-Wafd newspaper on Saturday, reporting that the two ministries announced a strategy to incorporate Egyptians unable to stay in the Gulf due the COVID-19 pandemic into the labor force working on national projects. 

The weekend announcement came as the pressure of global lockdown is beginning to show in Egypt’s labor market, with stats over the weekend showing a sudden and substantial drop in the rate of employment for April. Signs of the squeeze continue, with more major layoffs in industry despite a series of government relief measures intended to support employers.

As thousands of repatriated Egyptian laborers return from the Gulf and elsewhere they are being asked to fill out alternative employment forms as part of a plan to integrate them into an already struggling economy. Immigration Minister Nabila Makram and Planning Minister Hala al-Saeed described the government’s ongoing efforts to repatriate Egyptians whose residency permits had expired abroad, or who got stuck outside of Egypt during global lockdown. The ministers said they would be recruiting skilled Egyptian workers to “support [efforts] to sustain the development of national projects,” and to “maximize the use of human resources,” according to the Al-Wafd news website.

The news came over a weekend in which COVID-19’s impact on the labor market became clearer, with the CAPMAS releasing figures to show that unemployment jumped to 9.2 percent in April, despite a year-on-year decline to 7.7 percent in the first quarter of 2020. 

Employment rates appear to be suffering in the wake of the pandemic despite the government’s efforts to extend support to companies and workers, especially in the tourism sector. Informal and day laborers have received cash grants from the Manpower Ministry, as have contracted workers in the tourist sector, who received a disbursement over this weekend according to a Saturday headline from the Al-Borsa news website which reads, “[Manpower Minister Mohamed] Safan: LE130 mn granted to 120,000 workers [in the tourism sector] working in 880 facilities.”

Relief measures offered to both industry and the tourism sector have likewise been conditional on companies’ retaining their employees.  

Nonetheless, more news on Saturday attested to worker layoffs in industries cutting their wage bill as an immediate response to the crisis. Coverage from Cairo24 on Saturday reported that over 200 employees were sacked without warning from the Ghabbour Group, which manufactures cars, buses and motorbikes.

 Workers who spoke to Cairo24 said the company had first deducted 20 percent of the workers’ salaries. One former employee said that he would have preferred to take a major pay cut if only to keep his job, as he had a spouse and children at home with no alternative source of income. The workers from Ghabbour have submitted a complaint to the Cabinet, but are yet to hear a response.

The Ghabbour Group laborers are only the latest to find themselves on the line amid global lockdown. Reports of industrial action have picked up, with Al-Watan running coverage of 1,200 workers who protested late salary payments at a clothes factory in Ismailia in early May, and the partisan Darb website reporting on one strike at Kafr al-Dawar’s textile and weaving factory in April, among several similar incidents across Egypt. 

As for long-term changes to labor conditions, Parliament’s general session is due to vote on amendments to the Public Sector Business Law in the House on Sunday. Changes include the cancellation of routine monthly bonuses in favor of distributing no more than 12 percent of company profits to workers, in a structural change that will make workers’ pay more conditional on companies’ success.

Beyond the top news, several other items related to COVID-19 made headlines.

• Saturday saw another surge in the number of new cases recorded, quashing premature hopes last week that Egypt could be witnessing a downward trend. Nevertheless, the full lockdown that the Doctors Syndicate continues to request looks increasingly unlikely, as the Health Ministry and the Cabinet were working early into the hours of Sunday morning to rebut rumors of a total lockdown for the Eid holiday beginning May 23.
• The Cabinet Crisis Committee is due to meet tomorrow to finalize a plan for dealing with the coronavirus over the Eid al-Fitr holiday, with informed sources who spoke to Cairo24 hinting that the measures would likely be similar to those seen over Sham al-Nasseem, with most public places, beaches, squares and some roads closed to the public to prevent overcrowding.
•  The Doctors Syndicate looks like it will be ready with recommendations on Sunday too (though there’s a chance they’ll not be the same as the Cabinet’s), with a presser scheduled for noon.
• Increasingly vocal in advocating for the rights of Egypt’s nursing staff, who have faced substantial exposure to COVID-19 on the front lines of the effort to contain the virus, the Nurses Syndicate took on the government in a series of statements which criticized its response over the weekend:
  • “Current infection protocol makes it difficult for medical staff, especially nurses, to combat the coronavirus,” the Nurses Syndicate stated in a letter to the Cabinet and the president, joining the Doctors Syndicate in opposing new Health Ministry guidelines on testing and isolation that were issued on May 12, and which both professional unions have argued make it still more difficult for them to access the testing they need.
  • Separately, a call for nurses infected with COVID-19 to be treated at military and police hospitals came from Kawthar Mahmoud, who heads the Nurses Syndicate. In comments to the Cairo24 news website she said, “nurses shouldn’t be sacrificing their health and their lives, convinced that they’re martyring themselves”
  • As of Thursday night, 70 nurses had contracted COVID-19, and seven in total had died from complications due to the disease.
  • A nurse was also reported to have died of COVID-19 at Batinah Hospital in Zagazig, with a total of 19 members of the hospital’s staff infected to date.
•  A Health Ministry source told Masrawy on Friday that 135,000 PCR tests had been conducted in Egypt until now. Judging from the titbits of information on testing that have been released by authorities, that means around 30,000 PCR tests were conducted over the past week.
• Former Doctors Syndicate deputy head Mona Mina is likewise still on the warpath, reiterating on Friday the syndicate’s urgent call for a more comprehensive lockdown before Eid: “It’s a mistake to open malls, hotels and shops, and to reduce curfew hours, and then rely on ‘people’s awareness’ or claim that the ‘people are at fault’ because the measures themselves give the impression that it’s fine to loosen up,” she wrote.

The medical workers unions’ actions are, of course, fueled by the growing cases of COVID-19 infection among hospital staff. 

• The Doctors Syndicate said that 230 doctors in total have now tested positive for the novel coronavirus since the pandemic hit Egypt: That’s around 155 more infections over a three-week period. Among them, 11 doctors have died.
  • After an outbreak of COVID-19 among staff at the Manshiyat al-Bakry Hospital, a Thursday statement from doctors at the hospital made a series of demands, including a 48-hour shutdown for sterilization, a full round of testing among all staff, a clear infection protocol and the provision of PPE for all members of staff. Their statement comes after news that 22 members of staff have tested positive for COVID-19, after only 25 tests were conducted. The decision to turn the hospital into a quarantine hospital has been suspended until either all healthcare workers and staff undergo a PCR test, or are replaced by a temporary team as they self-isolate for 14 days.
  • 20 members of the medical staff at the 6th of October Hospital have tested positive for COVID-19 after exposure to a COVID-19 patient.
  • A nurse at the Majid Health Unit in Beheira has contracted COVID-19, while four nurses and another staff member must also self-isolate for 14 days after they came into direct contact with the nurse.
  • A doctor, a paramedic and a nurse reportedly tested positive for COVID-19 in Kafr al-Sheikh on Sunday.
  • Two ancillary workers at health facilities at Luxor have contracted the novel coronavirus: The first is a lab specialist at West Luxor Fever Hospital, and the second held a supervisory role in another Luxor lab. 
  • A statement published on Facebook announced the death of Safaa Mohamed Ali, a nurse at the Agamy Quarantine Hospital in Alexandria, according to a statement. The statement claims she contracted the virus while working at a healthcare center for children.

• As for other workplaces that have stayed open during the pandemic, things haven’t gone smoothly for the judiciary, which began a push to open the courts gradually after April 30.

• • Six judicial figures, including judges and prosecutors, have contracted COVID-19, the Judges Club spokesperson announced on Friday.
  • A man who works as a cashier at the Kobry al-Qubba Metro Station has tested positive for COVID-19. Sources speaking to Cairo24 insisted that he didn’t contract the virus at work.
  • A floor at a branch of Telecom Egypt in Cairo’s Fifth Settlement shut down temporarily after a tech support employee tested positive for COVID-19. All staff members who were in contact with the employee have been given leave, although the Cairo24 report does not specify if they’ll be paid during their absence.
• Over 5,000 people were arrested for breaching curfew on Saturday, according to the Interior Ministry.