Syria entered its 10th year of war by the time Damascus kicked off with precautionary measures to confront the spread of the novel coronavirus pandemic, imposed a partial curfew, and circulated a ''Stay At Home campaign."
Fears of the virus stormed what remained of their social relations after years of destruction, poverty, homelessness, and displacement, raising the number of suicide and murder cases during the lock-down period.
The Director of the General Committee for Forensic Medicine in Syria, Dr. Zaher Hajo, revealed shocking numbers for the period between 20 March and 16 April, as the Committee's regional centers recorded 50 deaths, 13 of which were suicide while the remaining 37 were murders. It is worth noting that last year, 59 cases of suicide were recorded, averaging at 4 cases per month.
The government in Damascus imposed a partial curfew on 22 March as part of a set of precautionary measures to combat the new coronavirus.
In a statement to a local radio station, Hajo said that the suicide cases were geographically distributed as follows: 1 in Damascus countryside, 2 in As-Suwayda, 3 in Homs, 3 in Hama, 2 in Aleppo and 1 in Tartus. As for the murders, 8 took place in Damascus countryside, 16 in As-Suwayda, 6 in Daraa, 1 in Homs, 3 in Tartus, and 2 in Lattakia. These numbers did not include Deir Ezzor, Raqqah, al-Hasakah, and Idlib governorates as large parts of them do not fall under the jurisdiction of the government in Damascus.
Rights activists in Damascus believe unemployment that resulted from curfew contributed to the aggravation of family disputes, leading to a five-fold increase in divorces. The adviser to the Syrian Minister of Awqaf, Hassan Awad, sees that the lockdown "revealed a reality about marriages that we did not previously know of during normal daily life", as the Ministry of Awqaf has been receiving 5 divorce requests per day when it had previously received as few as 1 per day at worst.
Awad explained this by the "boredom of staying at home for long periods".
The rise in the rate of divorces came with a decline in the rate of new marriages as the government issued a ban on marriage requests except in urgent and necessary cases, to avoid crowding healthcare facilities to undergo mandatory pre-marital testing, in addition to reducing the number of judges and judiciary staff down to 10 %.
Funeral services have also been absent. Families have limited themselves to asking for prayers for the deceased in people's own homes or receiving condolences over social media, a means that has been heavily used during the war between Syrians inside their country and refugees for several purposes.
When the curfew was imposed, Syrians had extensive experience in moving their real-life activities online to overcome forced geographic distances. Even online shopping through Facebook rose, knowing that shopping on famous online websites is banned in Syria due to economic sanctions.
