Surrounded by rows of freshly dug graves, Mohammed Ebeid says he has never seen anything like this.
"It's strange. This has never happened before at the cemetery, altogether the years past, to possess these numbers of the dead,"said the gravedigger in Yemen's southern city of Aden.
"A lot of individuals have brought their dead to us from the pandemic, the rains and therefore the disease, and from this scourge that has come to us," Ebeid added. "We don't even know what it's and why it's killed numerous ."
Cemeteries in Aden are overflowing with graves, suggesting that the amount of individuals killed by the new coronavirus is above the official count.
To date, officials within the war-ravaged country have reported 222 confirmed infections and 42 related deaths.
But the important numbers are hard to determine thanks to the country's extremely limited testing capacity. consistent with data compiled by the International Rescue Committee, Yemen has one among the world's lowest testing rates, even compared with other conflict-hit countries, at just 31 tests per a million citizens.
In a statement on May 14, Save the youngsters said nearly 400 people in Aden were reported to possess died of coronavirus-like symptoms in only one week. The international charity warned that several hospitals within the city had pack up and medical staff were refusing to travel to figure for lack of proper personal protective equipment (PPE).
"Our teams on the bottom are seeing how people are being sent faraway from hospitals, breathing heavily or maybe collapsing. People are dying because they can not get treatment that might normally save their lives," said Mohammed Alshamaa, Save the Children's director of programmes in Yemen.
"There are patients who go from hospital to hospital and yet cannot get admitted. We're hearing of families who have lost two or three loved ones within the past few weeks."
Aden has been the interim seat of Yemen's internationally-recognised government following the takeover of the capital, Sanaa, by the Houthi rebels in late 2014.
The conflict escalated in 2015 when neighbouring Saudi Arabia and its allies intervened to reverse the rebels' territorial gains and restore the govt of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
War-ravaged Yemen is split between the Saudi-backed government based in Aden and its foe, the Iran-aligned Houthi group, within the north.
The war has killed tens of thousands of individuals , mostly civilians, and pushed millions to the brink of famine. As a result, the country's malnourished population has among the world's lowest immunity levels to disease
Yemen wars of fighting have also shattered the country's healthcare system, to the purpose where the United Nations warned on Friday that it's "in effect collapsed".
"We are overwhelmed," said Caroline Seguin, Yemen operations manager for Doctors borderless (Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF), which runs the sole dedicated coronavirus facility in southern Yemen.
"We were obliged to refuse patients because we did not have enough oxygen and medical staff to be ready to treat the patients. So, it's extremely heartbreaking."
The organisation suspects that 40 of its staff members have also been infected, but there are not any tests to see . It also believes that in Aden about 70 people are dying of coronavirus in their homes a day .
Meanwhile, the UN's involves a ceasefire during the pandemic have largely been ignored.
"Residents within the south of Yemen, and every one over the country really, are following the crisis emerging everywhere the planet and are rightly concerned," said Fatima al-Asrar, a non-resident scholar at the center East Institute.
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