COLOMBO —
Sri Lanka’s doctors warned on Sunday they were
nearly out of life-saving medicines and said the island nation’s economic
crisis threatened a worse death toll than the coronavirus pandemic.
اضافة اعلان
Weeks of power blackouts and severe shortages of
food, fuel, and pharmaceuticals have brought widespread misery to Sri Lanka,
which is suffering its worst downturn since independence in 1948.
The Sri Lanka Medical Association (SLMA) said that
all hospitals in the country no longer had access to imported medical tools and
vital drugs.
Several facilities have already suspended routine
surgeries since last month because they were dangerously low on anesthetics,
but the SLMA said that even emergency procedures may not be possible very soon.
“We are made to make very difficult choices. We have
to decide who gets treatment and who will not,” the group said Sunday, after
releasing a letter they had sent President
Gotabaya Rajapaksa days earlier to
warn him of the situation.
“If supplies are
not restored within days, the casualties will be far worse than from the
pandemic.”
Mounting public anger over the crisis has seen large
protests calling for Rajapaksa’s resignation.
Thousands of people braved heavy rains to keep up a
demonstration outside the leader’s seafront office in the capital
Colombo for a
second day.
Business leaders joined calls for the president to
step down on Saturday and said the island’s chronic fuel shortages had seen
their operations hemorrhage cash.
Rajapaksa’s government is seeking an
International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout to help extricate Sri Lanka from the crisis, which
has seen skyrocketing food prices and the local currency collapse in value by a
third in the past month.
Finance ministry officials have said sovereign
bond-holders and other creditors may have to take a haircut as Colombo seeks to
restructure its debt.
New finance minister Ali Sabry told parliament on
Friday that he expects $3 billion from the IMF to support the island’s balance
of payments in the next three years.
A critical lack of foreign currency has left Sri
Lanka struggling to service its ballooning $51 billion foreign debt, with the
pandemic torpedoing vital revenue from tourism and remittances.
Economists say
Sri Lanka’s crisis has been
exacerbated by government mismanagement, years of accumulated borrowing, and
ill-advised tax cuts.
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