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| - Greek officials are using the coronavirus as a pretext to extend a lockdown in migrant camps, medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on Monday. The row comes as the country is loosening restrictions for the general population, reopening businesses and admitting foreign visitors for the start of the tourist season. "We cannot stay silent any more," said Marco Sandrone, MSF coordinator at the Moria camp on Lesbos, one of the most overcrowded in Greece's Aegean islands but where no coronavirus cases have been recorded. "The reason for the lockdown (in the camps) cannot be associated with public health," he told AFP. "People in the camp do not represent a threat. They are a population at risk." He said officials had failed to keep their promise to quickly move older people and those with chronic illnesses from the camps. Instead, they were being kept indoors with public health concerns being used as a pretext, he said. He said portraying migrants as a risk to the general population was "extremely dangerous rhetoric", especially when "the threat comes from outside". New arrivals at the camp posed a risk of infection to current residents, he said. "About this virus, we just pray that it doesn't come here," said Nasrin Hassani, an Afghan refugee at Moria who is eight months pregnant. If a single person caught the virus, she said, the camp would be overwhelmed because there were not enough doctors or medical supplies. "This camp is like a prison," she told AFP. Greece's announcement that it was extending the coronavirus lockdown at its migrant camps until July 5, cancelling plans to lift the measures on Monday, coincided with World Refugee Day on Saturday. It was the fourth extension of the camp lockdowns, announced just hours after a demonstration in Athens by around 2,000 people denouncing the treatment of migrants by the government of conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. Greece, with 190 coronavirus deaths recorded to date, has so far not been as badly hit as many other European countries -- and there have been no deaths in the migrant camps. But the presence of more than 32,000 asylum seekers on the five Aegean islands -- in camps with a capacity of 5,400 -- has caused major friction with local communities. The government is transferring thousands of migrants to the mainland in a bid to relieve the overcrowding. wv-chv/jj/jxb
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