MAMOUDZOU, Mayotte (AP) – Mayotte’s main tourist office is almost empty, a lonely tropical vantage point overlooking an uninhabited harbor. His only hospital, however, is overflowing.
Demand for intensive care beds exceeds three times the supply, as medical workers struggle to contain the worst outbreak of coronavirus in French Indian Ocean territory to date.
The Mayotte Islands are the poorest corner of the European Union, located between Madagascar and the mainland coast of Mozambique in southern Africa. They have been the last place in France to receive coronavirus vaccines.
Local authorities feel forgotten and claim that their difficulties in fighting the virus reflect long-standing inequalities between the predominantly French white land and its former multiracial colonies.
The French army sends medical workers and a few ICU beds, but temporary aid will only reach the islands where masks are a luxury, where almost a third of the region’s 300,000 people have no running water and where there is a new closure is suffocating livelihoods.
“We were going 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 who lives in a shack in Mayotte’s capital, Mamoudzou.
Last week, authorities shut down Mayotte’s economy and ordered people to stay home to combat cases of rapid growth 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 set up empty beaches and police patrol the quiet streets of Mamoudzou’s business district, many people in the Bandrajou district of Soilihi appear to be unaware of blocking rules or social distancing measures. Groups of boys play barefoot on dusty ground, girls carry buckets on their heads to fetch water from a collective bomb; an elderly woman at an informal street stop braids the hair of a younger woman. Hardly anyone wears a mask.
Healthcare workers recognize 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 indicators are getting darker … people fall 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 viruses since the pandemic began – a third of them in the last two weeks – and at least 68 deaths, double the national mortality rate per capita.
This made it even more disappointing that Mayotte was the last French overseas region to get a vaccine package, a month after the first doses of landing 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 delivered the super-freezer needed to store Mayotte’s initial deliveries of 950 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines. There have been more shipments and so far the territory has vaccinated 2,400 people, ie less than 1% of its population.
In Paris, government spokesman Gabriel Attal initially argued that the young population of Mayotte (only 4% are over 60) meant that the region was a low priority for vaccination, given their ” demographic and geographical realities that are obviously different ”from the mainland.
But now that infections are spreading, France’s central government is increasingly concerned.
Doctors transport several patients to the ICU daily on the nearby Reunion Island. The French army flew medical workers on Sunday. The regional health service organizes water deliveries to encourage the poorest to stay home.
Many islands and countries in the Indian Ocean on the African continent face similar outbreaks – or worse – to vaccine delays.
Madagascar, with 27 million people, does not yet have vaccines. Mozambique, with 30 million people, has imposed a curfew to combat a wave driven by the dominant variant in South Africa and has no vaccines either. Nor the nearby islands of the Comoros, for its population of 850,000.
The largest country in the region, South Africa, with 60 million people, has reported more than 1.47 million cases, including more than 46,800 deaths. His health minister announced Wednesday that the government will give the Johnson & Johnson vaccine not yet approved to health workers after a small test showed that the AstraZeneca vaccine only offers minimal protection against the dominant variant in the country.
Mayotte MP Mansour Kamardine does not understand why his homeland is in such dire situations.
When the rest of the Comoros chain voted in the 1970s for France’s independence after a century and a half of colonial rule, Mayotte residents voted overwhelmingly to stay French.
Today, Mayotte has the same administrative status as any region of 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 overseas lands of France.
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 French power.
He wrote to the government asking for more permanent beds in the ICU, without success. The whole territory has only 16.
Mayotte is among the nine territories, mostly French, with a special status in the EU as an “outermost region”. who have access to development funds intended to reduce the economic gap with the remaining European continent from the colonial era.
But now Europe is facing its own vaccine problems and the protracted economic crisis, Mayotte’s outlook looks bleak.
Lots 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 (almost 7,000 miles) away. Metal grilles hide shop windows. Business travel and tourism have fallen as the pandemic is losing ground.
At the Caribou restaurant, bar and hotel, Chaima Nombamba manages the takeaway counter, the only part of the business that can still be operated.
The hotel was closed due to a “flood of cancellations”. Most restaurant staff have temporary unemployment, a French government coronavirus program that does not enjoy the informal economy.
“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 badly affected, which is slowly dying from small fires? She asked.
“We do not know what tomorrow will bring. We can’t make plans or anticipate certain things because it changes every day, ”he said. “So where’s the solution?”
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Charlton reported from Paris. Andrew Meldrum in Johannesburg contributed.