18 May

A second humanitarian flight carrying Personal Protective Equipment – PPE, medicines and medical equipment procured by the World Food Programme-WFP and World Health Organziation-WHO arrived in Yangon yesterday. The aid is part of their ongoing support to the efforts of the Ministry of Health and Sports (MoHS) to scale up fighting against COVID-19. The aid is worth over US$40,000, according to the WFP office in Yangon. The special flight landed at Yangon International Airport at 10 am yesterday.

The equipment procured by WFP will be distributed to frontline fighters, said Mr Walid Ibrahim, Deputy chief of mission of the WFP Programme in Myanmar, expressing his hope that the humanitarian flights arranged by WFP would make the fighting against the pandemic in Myanmar more effective.

Meanwhile, vital medical supplies and equipment procured by WHO will be handed over to the Ministry of Health and Sports in support of the government’s efforts to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

As international commercial flights remain temporarily suspended as part of measures to contain the spread of COVID-19, the World Food Programme, on behalf of the United Nations in Myanmar, is launching a series of humanitarian flights linking Yangon and Kuala Lumpur to bring in humanitarian cargo and personnel, with financial support from the European Union and Switzerland.

The first humanitarian flight, which 10,000 COVID-19 test kits, the first batch of 20,000 kits, reagents and viral transport medium that United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) had procured, arrived in Yangon on 10 May.

Similarly, India, China, the Republic of Korea, Singapore and Japan also donated vital medicinal supplies to Myanmar for combatting the COVID-19 pandemic.— Zaw Gyi