MAMOUDZOU, Mayotte (AP) – Mayotte’s main tourist office is almost empty, a lonely tropical outpost overlooking homeless people. However, his only hospital was overwhelmed.
The demand for beds with intensive care is more than triple in supply, as medical workers are struggling to curb the worst outbreak of the coronavirus in the French Indian Ocean.
The Mayotte Islands are the poorest corner of the European Union, between Madagascar and mainland Mozambique in southern Africa. It was the last place in France to receive any coronavirus vaccines.
Local authorities feel forgotten and say their problems in fighting the virus reflect the inequalities between France’s majority white continent and its distant multiracial former colonies.
The French army is sending in medical workers and some ICU beds, but temporary aid will only go so far on the islands where masks are a luxury, where almost a third of the 300,000 people in the region have no running water and where a new lock is suffocating livelihood.
“We used to work in the big market to sell things, to have money to feed our families,” said Ahamada Soulaimana Soilihi, a 40-year-old father of six, in a cottage in the capital Mamoudzou of Mayotte. said.
Last week, authorities shut down Mayotte’s economy and ordered people to stay home to combat fast-growing cases of the virus variant that prevails in South Africa.
“How can we live without work, without being able to move, without something?” Vra Soilihi.
As the sea waves roam empty beaches and police patrol the quiet streets of Mamoudzou’s business district, many people in the Bandrajou area of Soilihi seem unaware of lock-in rules or social distance measures. Bunches of children play barefoot on the dusty ground, girls carry buckets on their heads to fetch water at a collective pump, an older woman at an informal street stall braids the hair of a younger woman. Almost no one wears a mask.
Health professionals acknowledge that there is no easy solution.
The virus attacks Mayotte in a ‘brutal and rapid way’, Dominique Voynet, head of the local health service, told the Associated Press. “All indicators are getting darker … people are falling like flies.”
Mayotte’s weekly infection rate is now almost four times higher than the national French average. The area has registered 11,447 virus cases since the onset of the pandemic – a third of them in the past two weeks – and at least 68 deaths, doubling the country’s death toll per capita.
This made it all the more disappointing that Mayotte was the last French overseas region to send a vaccine, a month after the first doses landed in Paris, more than 8,400 kilometers away.
“To my great dismay, we were equipped much later than other (French) regions,” Voynet said.
The French Foreign Legion provided the super-freezer needed to store Mayotte’s initial deliveries of 950 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines. More shipments flooded in, and the area has so far vaccinated 2,400 people, or less than 1% of the population.
In Paris, government spokesman Gabriel Attal initially argued that Mayotte’s young population – only 4% older than 60 – meant that the region was a low priority for vaccination, noting the ‘demographic and geographical realities that naturally exist. differs’ from the mainland.
But now that infections are raging, the central government of France is increasingly concerned.
Doctors transport several ICU patients daily to nearby Reunion Island. The French army flew in medical workers on Sunday. The local health service arranges water deliveries to encourage the poorest to stay at home.
Many islands in the Indian Ocean and countries on the African continent are being delayed by similar – or worse – outbreaks and vaccinations.
Madagascar, with 27 million people, does not yet have vaccinations. Mozambique, with 30 million people, has set a curfew to combat a boom driven by the variant in South Africa, and also has no vaccines. The nearby islands of the Comoros also do not have a population of 850,000.
The largest country in the region, South Africa, with 60 million people, reported more than 1.47 million cases, including more than 46,800 deaths. The Minister of Health announced on Wednesday that the government will distribute the as yet unapproved vaccine Johnson & Johnson to health workers after a small test showed that the AstraZeneca vaccine offers only minimal protection against the variant prevalent in the country.
Mayotte’s lawmaker, Mansour Kamardine, does not understand why his country of birth is in such dire straits.
When the rest of the Comoros island chain voted for independence from France in the 1970s after a century and a half of colonial rule, the people of Mayotte voted overwhelmingly to remain French.
Today, Mayotte has the same administrative status as any region on the French mainland – one of the richest countries in the world. The territory uses the euro as its currency and is represented in the European Parliament. A 2003 law promises ‘freedom, equality and fraternity’ to all people in France’s overseas countries.
But when the virus hit, “Mayotte was forgotten,” Kamardine told the AP. “We are far from the eyes, we are far from the heart” of the French force.
He wrote to the government to plead for more permanent ICU beds, in vain. The whole area has only 16.
Mayotte is among nine areas – mostly French – with a special status in the EU as an “outer region”. which has access to development funds aimed at reducing the economic gap with the European continent that remained from the colonial era.
But with Europe now facing its own vaccination problems and protracted economic crisis, Mayotte’s prospects look bleak.
Stacks of red plastic Coca-Cola chairs gather dust in a Mamoudzou cafe, shaded by palm trees, where a sign points to Tokyo, 11,230 kilometers away. Metal grilles hide window panes. Business travel and tourism have increased as the pandemic continues.
In the Caribou restaurant, bar and hotel, Chaima Nombamba manages the eviscerator counter – the only business still allowed to operate.
The hotel closed due to a flood of cancellations. Most of the restaurant staff have temporary unemployment – a coronavirus program of the French government that people in the informal economy do not enjoy.
‘Yes, the health crisis is very serious, and it has a deadly impact on some of us. But is this the time to punish small businesses, especially our sector of activities, which are being hit really hard, being killed little by little by small fires? She asked.
“We do not know what tomorrow will bring. We can not make plans or expect certain things, because it changes every day, ”she said. “Where’s the solution?”
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Charlton reported from Paris. Andrew Meldrum in Johannesburg.