Uzbekistan: Heartbreak and despair for expat laborers trapped by COVID, 5 June 2020

...Millions of Uzbeks live abroad for work – mostly in Russia, but also in Kazakhstan and Turkey, and even in South Korea. In January, Valentina Matviyenko, the speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament, said during a visit to Tashkent that 2.2 million Uzbek nationals live and work across Russia.

The first confirmation of a COVID-19 case in Uzbekistan came on March 15. One day later, the authorities suspended air and rail travel. That rapid reaction immediately precipitated a swell of appeals to Uzbek diplomatic missions for assistance in returning home – around 65,000 have sought such help in Russia alone...

The scramble to return home stems in part from the dramatic impact of the coronavirus crisis on the labor market. Remittance figures tell their own story of job losses and rapidly declining incomes...

In Uzbekistan itself, not everybody is delighted about the return of so many compatriots from Russia. They look at the relative new infection figures – high in Russia, low in Uzbekistan – and worry about the implications. Grumbling has broken out on social media about migrant workers “spoiling the statistics.”