A snack vendor in Yangon’s Insein Township draws customers who are not too keen on physical distancing and face mask etiquette. Photo: courtesy of Kyaw Lin Htoon.

No one left behind?

Despite COVID-19’s light footprint, economic fallout threatens to undo the gains of Myanmar’s decade-long climb out of isolation.

Ben Dunant has been working as a journalist and researcher in Myanmar since 2014. He is Managing Editor at Yangon-based magazine Frontier Myanmar. Kyaw Lin Htoon is a journalist at Frontier Myanmar magazine in Yangon. He previously worked at Myanmar Now, Mawkun and Myanmar Business Today.

Published on:

17 Jul 2020, 7:10 am

Insein Township, a northern suburb of Myanmar's commercial capital, Yangon, has always been famous for the wrong reasons. It hosts the country's largest prison, a red-brick colonial edifice where several of Myanmar's most famous political prisoners wrote harrowing memoirs of their time behind bars. In January 1949, a year after independence from the British, it was a battle ground. Soldiers from the Karen ethnic group, seeking autonomy from the Bamar majority, tried to seize the city, then called Rangoon. They were repelled after a fierce battle at Insein.

More recently, the township, which has a population of around 300,000, became the epicentre of Myanmar's COVID-19 epidemic. This was thanks to a cluster of infections linked to sermons in early April 2020 led by a Christian pastor, David Lah, who was visiting from Canada. This cluster from Myanmar's only 'super-spreader' events included one of the country's biggest rock stars, Myo Gyi of the band Iron Cross, as well as David Lah himself, who had told congregants that faith in Christianity would protect them from the virus. It took until 1 July for the government to lift stay-at-home orders that were imposed on Insein in mid-April.

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economy

labour

COVID-19

health

Myanmar