As fighting rages in Nagorno-Karabakh, coronavirus spreads

STEPANAKERT, Nagorno-Karabakh (AP) — People infected with the coronavirus pack into cold basements along with the healthy to hide from artillery fire in Nagorno-Karabakh, while doctors who have tested positive do surgery on those wounded in the shelling. These are the grim realities of the pandemic in a region beset by weeks of heavy fighting.

Nagorno-Karabakh, which lies within Azerbaijan but has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia for more than a quarter-century, is facing the largest escalation of hostilities since a war there ended in 1994. In just over three weeks, hundreds of people have been killed. Two attempts at cease-fires have failed to stop the conflict.

The fighting has diverted the region's scarce resources from containing the outbreak, which spread unchecked during the first two weeks of fighting that began on Sept. 27.

Contact-tracing ground to a halt, and intense artillery and rocket strikes forced people into overcrowded bunkers, where it was impossible to separate the sick from the healthy. Health workers have been hit particularly hard.

“Almost everyone got infected, some had it in a light form and others in a more serious one,” Malvina Badalyan, chief doctor at the infectious disease clinic in the regional capital of Stepanakert, said of health workers in the region.

But in the middle of a war, with wounded people flooding into hospitals, there's nothing to do but keep working.

“Many doctors and nurses knew that they were infected, but they kept mum about it,” said Ararat Ohanjanyan, the health minister for Nagorno-Karabakh’s regional government. “They may lie down in a corner to bring the fever down and then get up and continue to perform surgeries.”

“No one has the right now to step aside,” he...