Climate-Driven Monster Cyclone and Coronavirus hits Thousands in India, Bangladesh

By Dilip -
The strongest cyclone in recorded history flattened the Bay of Bengal this week, coming after both Indian West Bengal and the country of Bangladesh. Massive and successful early warning systems and the movement of 2.4 million people into shelters kept India’s and Bangladesh’s loss of life to 80 dead. That compares to half a million dead in a cyclone in 1970, and 3500 dead in 2007. The 100-mile an hour winds on landfall nevertheless destroyed thousands of homes, leaving people without shelter.

On May 18 when tropical cyclone Amphan was still out in the Bay of Bengal and before landfall, it was clocked as the most powerful tropical superstorm in recorded history. In the areas worst hit, Alex Ward at Vox reports, 90% of clinics, community centers and businesses were destroyed. He notes that hundreds of Bangladeshi villages are underwater and a million have been left without electricity. Ward says that victims of the cyclone are refusing to go to shelters where they might get government help because they are afraid of contracting Covid-19 among the crowds there.

The cyclone not only created vast swathes of displacement, homelessness and misery, it worsened already-existing crises. India and Bangladesh are now beginning to be hit hard by the coronavirus, which could be spread by millions of persons on the move to escape the cyclone. India surged by 6,000 new cases to 118,000 covid-19 patients yesterday. In a country as large and poor as India, these are likely vast undercounts. Some Rohingya refugees from Burma (Myanmar), chased from their homes by militant Buddhist mobs, were directly in the path of the cyclone...
https://www.juancole.com/2020/05/coronavirus-thousands-bangladesh.html





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