Multi-Year Impact of Health Obstructions on COVID-19 Fatalities in Post-Coup Myanmar

Myanmar’s coup d’état of February 2021 deposed the democratically elected civilian administration with a military dictatorship, destabilizing the region with internal conflict and undue political imprisonments in the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, the sudden overthrow of the government revealed the fatal implications of politicizing public health crises and serves as a prominent modern representation of an unjust seizure of power and bio-weaponization. However, existing literature has relied predominantly on qualitative data to describe the unsettling humanitarian crisis in Myanmar, insufficiently highlighting a fraction of a multifaceted campaign against human rights. To address this significant gap in understanding, the current work departs from the qualitative focus of existing studies, and instead leverages quantitative methodology to draw relationships between socio-political factors, healthcare obstruction (e.g., 'Health Workers Killed', 'Forceful Entry into Health Facility'), and multi-year COVID-19 fatalities in Myanmar (2020-2023). Multivariate regression analysis results show significant associations between healthcare obstruction, vaccination uptake, testing, new cases, and COVID-19 fatalities, signaling that every additional incident of either healthcare obstruction, new COVID-19 case, or recorded testing incident is related to a staggering increase in COVID-19 fatalities. The findings emphasize the urgent need to address the weaponization of pandemics through political and public health interventions by authoritarian powers. Furthermore, this study highlights yet another large-scale humanitarian crisis in Myanmar and sparks a debate on the fundamental constitution of preventing the effects of disease weaponization and bio-warfare at the national and international levels.