Happy Passover! Yesterday I posted about Coronachan's trip to the Holy Land☪️✝️✡️. I promised that I'd follow it with a post about Egypt, and I'm a man of my word.

On March 24, Egypt's government acknowledged that Coronachan had infected 366 citizens, killing 19 of them. It then ordered the closure of every business in the country except for pharmacies, grocery stores, and bakeries, suspended all air travel until April 15th, closed every school and university in the country, shut all mosques 🕌 and churches ⛪, closed all museums and archaeological sites, and imposed a 7pm - 6am curfew. Violators will be fined $255 (for Egyptians, that's a lot), and may be arrested 👮.

As usual for the Middle East, Haaretz is doing the best journalism on this. This may or may not be paywalled (if you're a free subscriber and you've hit your monthly maximum, try switching browsers), so I'll summarize the key points:

• The week before Egypt entered lockdown, a team of Canadian 🍁 scientists published an article in which they estimated that Cairo was underreporting its number of infections by a factor of about six thousand (the government was then claiming that three Egyptians were sick; the scientists estimated that the figure was more like 19,310).

• German-British journalist Ruth Michaelson, who had been working in Cairo since 2014, infuriated 😡 the Egyptian authorities by reporting the Canadians' findings.

• Michaelson was summoned to Police HQ, where she was personally interrogated for three and a half hours by Egyptian Information Minister Diaa Rashwan himself and had her journalistic loicense suspended.

• But the Egyptians still weren't done with Michaelson, and they summoned her for a second hearing, to "discuss her visa status."

• The German Embassy in Cairo learned about this, and warned Michaelson to flee. She made her exodus on one of the last flights to be allowed out of Egypt.

• With Michaelson out of reach, the Egyptian government vented its fury on Egyptian journalists, and warned them to publish the official figures or else.

• In a totally unpredictable turn of events, Egyptians turn to the Internet for whatever information they can get. Rumors start getting wild.

• Meanwhile, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi had mysteriously vanished for two weeks, leading to rumors that he was sick, perhaps even dead. Egyptians are all like 😨😨😨

• Sisi quelled rumors by making a public appearance, in which he announced that two of Egypt's seniormost generals had died of the virus. Now Egyptians are all like 😱😱😱

• 5 days into the quarantine, millions of newly-broke Egyptians were getting angry. "The curfew is a death sentence that will execute us all, and then there will be no more infected people," proposed one newly-unemployed Egyptian.

• As of March 29, the government was claiming that only 40 people had died and 540 become infected. The people who believed this wondered if shutting down literally everything wasn't an overreaction. Everyone else assumed the government was full of shit and kept panicking.

That's all from Haaretz.

In the run-up to the lockdown, Cairo was demanding that foreign newspapers apologize for running Michaelson's story and jailing local journalists who questioned state statistics for "being members of the Muslim Brotherhood."

Ruh-roh, a leaked military document reveals that the army has subjected its soldiers to draconian measures, to protect against the well-controlled and not at all widespread virus. Also, now we know the reason Sisi's mysterious absence: he was in quarantine after coming into contact with one of the dead generals.

Then an anonymous high-ranking Egyptian army officer, who himself was infected, let the cat out of the bag: Egypt was deliberately deflating its numbers! They did it by:

• Hardly testing anyone at all for the disease

• Covering up cases within the military

• Making up fictional causes of death for people who die of COVID-19

• Reporting that the disease reached Egypt about a month later than it really did.

There's also this:

Even though it was known within military circles that the infection was spreading, the army’s leadership was careless, greeting each other with hugs 🤗 and kisses 👨‍❤️‍💋‍👨 as is traditional within Egyptian culture, and failing to maintain sufficient social distancing from conscripts, confirmed the senior officer.

According to a leaked "Top Secret" document, Coronachan isn't just spreading in Egypt; the Army has identified specific areas as hotspots.

If you're curious, here30233-4/fulltext) is the study that Ruth Michaelson got in trouble for reporting. It's written in sciencese but the gist of it is that Egypt was dramatically underreporting/ignoring its cases.

Egyptian TV is broadcasting PSAs like this. "Egypt shall defeat Corona (which we have under control, btw) just as China did" is the title.

Hundreds of jailed Egyptian doctors are offering to help out for free if the government please lets them out of prison please

Israel be like

So where will Coronachan's next drama be? Keep an eye on Indonesia 🇮🇩. Jakarta's enormous (maximum capacity 200,000!) Masjid Istiqlal is holding services this Friday as normal. But don't worry, they'll disinfect the floor.