Soldiers line up in Tripoli against protesters. (Credit: João Sousa/L’Orient Today)
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For the second day in a row, the Lebanese Army cracked down on protests in Tripoli against the COVID-19 lockdown, which has added to the burden of already suffering lower-income residents. The Lebanese Red Cross said it transferred nine people wounded at Al-Nour Square — an iconic protest site from the Oct. 17, 2019, uprising — to local hospitals, and treated another 36 at the scene; 41 were injured the night before. The coronavirus lockdown, implemented to curb an alarming surge of COVID-19 cases, is placing an additional burden on Lebanon’s most vulnerable residents amid dire economic circumstances — sparking protests scattered across the country. Residents blocked roads yesterday in Beirut and Saida, among several smaller locales.
Lebanon registered a record 73 COVID-19 deaths yesterday as the country’s hospitals continue to strain under the pressure of a surge of COVID-19 patients. ICU hospitalizations climbed to a record 937 while an additional 3,505 people tested positive for the virus. According to the latest figures from the World Health Organization, an unnerving 94.4 percent of intensive care beds are occupied while all of the ICUs in Beirut are at capacity. The enormous surge of hospitalizations comes after authorities loosened restrictions over the holiday season.
Authorities once again postponed the launch of an online platform to register people for the COVID-19 vaccine. The unveiling of the platform — originally scheduled for Monday — has been delayed to Thursday as final details for its rollout are ironed out, a Health Ministry spokesperson told L’Orient Today. He added that the launch will follow the announcement today of the full plan for vaccine distribution, including the finalized list of priority groups. Vaccines are set to begin arriving the first week of February; some 250,000 Pfizer doses are expected to arrive by the end of March.
The caretaker finance minister said he submitted the draft 2021 budget to the cabinet, nearly five months late. Ghazi Wazni should have transferred the draft by Sep. 1, 2020, according to law, which would have kickstarted the process for the cabinet and Parliament to approve the budget. Instead, the president on Jan. 16 signed a law allowing the country to once again resort to extraconstitutional means to finance its state bureaucracy. With the political elite’s failure to pass a budget by the beginning of the year, a constitutional deadline, the country is now relying on provisional spending. The constitution includes a failsafe that the state may be financed, only for the month of January, using one-twelfth of the budget of the previous year. This mechanism served as the shaky legal basis for state spending between 2005 and 2017, when ministers and lawmakers failed to pass budgets.