MAMOUDZOU, Mayotte (AP) – Mayotte’s main tourist office is almost empty, a lonely tropical outpost overlooking an uninhabited harbor. However, his only hospital is overwhelmed.
Demand for intensive care beds is more than triple the supply, as medical workers struggle to counter the worst outbreak of coronavirus in French Indian Ocean territory.
The islands of Mayotte are the poorest corner of the European Union, hidden between Madagascar and the mainland coast of Mozambique in southern Africa. They were the last place in France to receive coronavirus vaccines.
Local authorities feel forgotten and say their difficulties in fighting the virus reflect the long-standing inequalities between France’s majority white continent and its former remote multiracial colonies.
The French army is sending medical workers and a few ICU beds, but temporary aid will go so far only on islands where masks are a luxury, where nearly a third of the region’s 300,000 people have no running water and a new blockade is a means of live suffocating.
“We used to work at the big market to sell things, to have money to feed our families,” said Ahamada Soulaimana Soilihi, a 40-year-old father of 40 who lives on a construction site in the capital Mayoud. , Mamoudzou.
Then, last week, authorities shut down Mayotte’s economy, ordering people to stay home to combat the rapidly growing cases of the dominant virus variant in South Africa.
“How can we live without work, without being able to move, without anything?” Soilihi asked.
As ocean waves flood empty beaches and police patrol the quiet streets of the Mamoudzou business district, many people in the Bandrajou district of Soilihi do not seem to know the rules of blocking or social distance measures. Bunches of children play barefoot on the dusty ground, girls wear buckets on their heads to fetch water from a collective pump, an older woman at an informal street stall weaves the hair of a younger woman. Almost no one wears a mask.
Healthcare workers acknowledge that there is no easy solution.
The virus attacks Mayotte in a “brutal and rapid” way, Dominique Voynet, the head of the regional health service, told the Associated Press. “All the signs are getting darker and darker … people are falling like flies.”
Mayotte’s weekly infection rate is now almost four times higher than the French national average. The territory has recorded 11,447 cases of the virus since the beginning of the pandemic – a third of them in the last two weeks – and at least 68 deaths, double the death rate per virus per capita nationwide.
This made it all the more disappointing that Mayotte was the last French overseas region to receive a vaccine shipment, a month after the first doses landed in Paris, more than 8,400 kilometers away.
“We were equipped much later than other (French) regions, to my great dismay,” Voynet said.
The French Foreign Legion has delivered the super-freezer needed to store Mayotte’s initial deliveries of 950 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines. Several transports have been taken over, and the territory has so far vaccinated 2,400 people, or less than 1% of its population.
In Paris, government spokesman Gabriel Attal initially argued that Mayotte’s young population – only 4% are over 60 – means the region was a low priority for vaccination, citing “its demographic and geographical realities, which are obviously different ”Of the continent.
But now that infections are raging, France’s central government is increasingly concerned.
Doctors are transporting several intensive care patients a day to nearby Reunion Island. The French army flew medical workers on Sunday. The regional health service organizes water deliveries to encourage the poorest to stay at home.
Many islands and countries in the Indian Ocean on the African continent face similar outbreaks – or worse – with vaccine delays.
Madagascar, with 27 million people, does not yet have vaccines. Mozambique, with 30 million people, has imposed an extinction to fight against a growth caused by the dominant variant in South Africa and has no vaccines. Not even the nearby Comoros islands, for 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. His health minister announced on Wednesday that the government will administer the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which has not yet been approved. Health care workers after a small test showed that the AstraZeneca vaccine offers minimal protection against the dominant variant in the country.
Mayotte MP Mansour Kamardine does not understand why his country is in such a dire situation.
When the rest of the Comoros chain voted in the 1970s for independence from France, after a century and a half of colonial rule, the people of Mayotte overwhelmingly voted to remain French.
Today, Mayotte has the same administrative status as any region in mainland France – 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 the French overseas countries.
But when the virus struck, “Mayotte was forgotten,” Kamardine told AP. “We are far from the eyes, we are far from the heart” of the French power.
He wrote to the government to plead for several permanent intensive care beds to no avail. The whole territory has only 16.
Mayotte is among nine territories – mostly French – with a special status in the EU as an “outermost region” who have access to development funds meant to reduce the economic gap with the European continent left from the colonial era.
But Europe is now facing its own vaccine problems and the protracted economic crisis, Mayotte’s outlook appears weak.
Piles of red plastic Coca-Cola chairs collect dust in a Mamoudzou cafe, shaded by palm trees, where a sign indicates Tokyo, 11,230 kilometers away. Metal grilles hide shop windows. Business travel and tourism have declined as the pandemic continues.
At the Caribou restaurant, bar and hotel, Chaima Nombamba manages the dining counter – the only part of the business that is still allowed to operate.
The hotel was closed due to a “flood of cancellations”. Most of the restaurant’s staff are temporarily unemployed – a French government program for coronavirus, which the informal economy does not enjoy.
“Yes, the health crisis is very serious and there is a deadly impact for some of us. But is it time to punish small businesses, especially our industry, which is really hit hard, which is being killed by fire? ” she asked.
“We do not know what he will bring tomorrow. We can’t make plans or anticipate certain things because they change every day, “she said. “So where’s the solution?”
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Charlton reported from Paris. Andrew Meldrum from Johannesburg contributed.