Covid-19 hitting Qatar’s World Cup work sites

Aya Ezz

Qatar continues to overlook World Health Organization advices on means of avoiding the Covid-19 infection by maintaining work on the facilities that will participate in the FIFA World Cup 2022.

Nevertheless, in doing this, it shows no regard to the health of the foreign workers working on these facilities. This portends an international health crisis.

Sounding the alarm

Foreign Policy Magazine sounded the alarm over the dangers facing foreign workers in Qatar.

It said there are more than 2 million migrant workers in Qatar—a significant number given that the country’s overall population is just 2.6 million.

In recent years the foreign laborer population in Qatar has swelled as the country has undergone a construction boom ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, which is set to be held there.

Many of these workers come from villages across South Asia, sometimes after paying recruiters thousands of dollars to secure a job that they hoped would lift their families out of poverty.

But as the coronavirus pandemic edges its way across Qatar, which now has more than 2,000 confirmed cases, the migrant workers’ cramped living quarters and lack of access to health care, proper sanitation, and nutritious food imperils an already highly vulnerable group of people, Foreign Policy said.

It added that Qatar has a long history of migrant worker abuse and exploitation, which has garnered widespread international condemnation in recent years.

The abuse—which at times has amounted to forced labor and human trafficking—has been exacerbated by South Asian governments’ inability to successfully lobby for strong protections, the magazine said.

Critics contend there has been scant political will given the huge portion of GDP now made up by remittances from overseas workers.

Such issues are hardly unique to Qatar. The sheer of size of the migrant workforce compared to the general population, the overcrowded camps in which migrants live, and the construction pressures of the looming World Cup have placed foreign laborers in Qatar at particularly high risk of catching the coronavirus, it added.