2 Mideast countries have highest confirmed virus rates

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The small, neighboring sheikhdoms of Bahrain and Qatar appear to have among world's highest per capita rates of confirmed coronavirus infections, a result of extensive testing and rapid, undetected spread through camps housing healthy and young foreign laborers, studies now show.

In Qatar, a new study found that nearly 60% of those testing positive showed little or no symptoms at all, calling into question the usefulness of mass temperature checks meant to stop the infected from mingling with others. In Bahrain, its government put the asymptomatic figure even higher, at 68%.

Bahrain and Qatar have been able to test large portions of their small populations, allowing the two countries to find infections that other countries, with more limited testing, have not. A recent study in the U.S., for example, found that about 10 cases are missed for every one that is confirmed.

Qatar has found 37.4 coronavirus cases per 100,000 people, the highest rate of confirmed cases in the world, according to figures from the University of Oxford. Bahrain, at 22.1 confirmed cases per 100,000, is second. Other countries with high confirmed rates per population include San Marino, Chile, the Vatican, Kuwait, Oman, Panama and Armenia. The U.S. is at No. 10.

These results reflect both the wider problems faced by Gulf Arab countries reliant on cheap foreign labor and their relative success in tracking their COVID-19 epidemics, given their oil wealth and authoritarian governments.

Aggressive testing boosted the number of confirmed cases as health officials in Bahrain and Qatar targeted vulnerable labor camps and neighborhoods, where migrant workers from Asia sleep, eat and live up to dozen people per room.

“This is why globally we failed to control, I think, the infection because simply the response has...