Thank you. It's a pleasure to see some familiar faces on this little Zoom call. It's great to see you all.
The first thing I will say is that I was part of the first deployment to Cox's Bazar when refugees started streaming out of Myanmar's Rakhine State into Cox's Bazar. The conditions have only worsened since they first fled from Rakhine State to Cox's Bazar.
We have to imagine that in the best-case scenario in which many of us live, with regular handwashing, with the capacity for most of us to socially distance, with the kind of government support many people have had, COVID-19 has still been a huge problem. It has brought major economies to their knees, and the effects on the most vulnerable in those societies have been quite severe.
Concerning the Rohingya refugees in Cox's Bazar specifically, where you have 890,000 or maybe a million people confined in 26 square kilometres across 32 or 38 different camps, that is a huge number of people. Latrines are haphazardly dropped here, there and everywhere. There's no actual sewage facility that you would recognize, living in a city in Canada.
It's a very difficult position for many of those refugees. Before COVID-19, the Bangladeshi authorities already, in trying to contain.... They already had their own challenges, and we have to acknowledge—I agree with Saad—that the Bangladeshis have been very generous in hosting this many people. That has to be acknowledged, as well as the generosity of Canada.
Canada has played a hugely progressive role vis-à-vis.... Bob Rae's report and Bob Rae's interactions with the Rohingya file have been quite impressive. Despite all of that, the challenges for the Rohingya community were quite severe already.
After COVID became a global pandemic and so many governments were grappling with what to do, how to respond, how to reduce the risks, stop the spread, contain the spread, etc., the number of people allowed into the camps was reduced even further. The number of vehicles into the camps was reduced even further.
Some people have said they've found really creative ways of distributing aid, but some of our colleagues have said that actually, there are a few families who have been left out or they're not getting as much support as they need.
Add to that the creaking—and I say “creaking” generously—health services that are offered to the Rohingya refugees pre-COVID. Post-COVID, those health services are a lot less accessible at best and are totally inaccessible in many cases, simply because the movement in and out is restricted, as are the types of medical professionals, the medical personnel you would normally see from NGOs like ours or from such others as Doctors Without Borders, etc.
It's quite a challenge for many of these families, and so you have that issue permeating or adding a complex layer to an already complex situation.
Then you have the issue—most of this information I took from our field team, who are on the ground—of rumour in Cox's Bazar and what people are hearing, how they're hearing it, how information flows in and out about what COVID-19 is, how you prevent it and these types of things.
If we think of what's happening south of the border with the various communities who are anti-maskers or whatever name you want to label them with—people who have been resistant to scientific data because of the way it's served or how it's presented, and this in one of the most progressive countries, one of the most scientific nations on earth—the situation in Cox's Bazar is fraught. People aren't sure whom to believe, what to believe, where information comes from and goes to. They're suspicious about everything, actually. That constrains the capacity of the few health workers who are trying to do things.
In my final minute, I will say this. I think the actual effects of COVID-19 upon the Rohingya refugees from Myanmar are yet unknown and untold. That is the actual truth, because we do not have enough actual data, facts, surveys, and so on to say this is where we are, and this has been the consequence of thing x, which in this case is the COVID pandemic.
With that, I'll concede the floor.
Thank you, Peter.