Doctors Without Borders is an organization with an operational budget of 1.6 billion euros. It works in 72 countries, and 55% of our countries of intervention are in conflict zones. We have about 68,000 people working for the organization.
In terms of the response to a pandemic, we answer epidemics all year long. The smallest one is the measles, which nobody hears about, or polio or cholera. We do it over and over again.
When it comes to the big pandemics, most of the time we have much more of a focus on low- and middle-income countries or those in protective crises, because that is where there are more needs. The reality now with COVID-19 is that we are deployed in high-income countries. For example, in Italy we are running four hospitals. In France, we are doing all the home care with the government in Île-de-France. We work in Germany. We work in Spain. We work in Greece. We will probably increase our budget in high-income countries by easily tenfold from what we have had in the past.
This is something very different, and it's probably linked to the fact that there are travel bans. It's probably also linked to the fact that we have an expertise to offer in terms of pandemic response, because most of our staff have worked at tackling epidemics in different countries. We work almost everywhere that we have an office.
Right now in Canada, MSF Canada will be working on infection prevention control in elder homes and first nations communities.