MAMOUDZOU, Mayotte (AP) – Mayotte’s main tourist office is almost empty, a lonely tropical outpost overlooking a people-free port. His only hospital, however, is full.
Demand for intensive care beds is more than triple the supply, as medical workers struggle to contain the worst coronavirus outbreak in French Indian Ocean territory.
The Mayotte Islands are the poorest corner of the European Union, located between Madagascar and the mainland coast of Mozambique, in southern Africa. They were the last place in France to receive any coronavirus vaccine.
Local authorities feel forgotten and say that their difficulties in fighting the virus reflect the old inequalities between France’s white-majority continent and its former multiracial colonies.
The French army is sending medical workers and some ICU beds, but temporary aid only goes so far on islands where masks are a luxury, where almost a third of the region’s 300,000 people have no running water and where a new block is a 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 father of six, 40, who lives in a slum in the capital of Mayotte, Mamoudzou.
Then, last week, authorities shut down Mayotte’s economy, ordering people to stay at 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 hit deserted beaches and police patrol the quiet streets of Mamoudzou’s commercial district, many people in Soilihi’s Bandrajou neighborhood do not seem to be aware of the blocking rules or measures of social detachment. Groups of children play barefoot on the dusty floor, girls carry buckets over their heads to fetch water from a collective pump, an older woman in an informal street stall braids a younger woman’s hair. Almost nobody wears a mask.
Health professionals recognize that there is no easy solution.
The virus is attacking Mayotte in a “brutal and fast” way, Dominique Voynet, head of the regional health service, told the Associated Press. “All the indicators 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 registered 11,447 cases of viruses since the beginning of the pandemic – a third of them in the last two weeks – and at least 68 deaths, twice the per capita mortality rate due to viruses across the country.
This made it even more disappointing that Mayotte was the last French region abroad to receive a vaccine shipment, a month after the first doses arrived in Paris, more than 8,400 kilometers (5,000 miles) away.
“We were equipped much later than other (French) regions, much to my dismay,” said Voynet.
The French Foreign Legion delivered the super freezer needed to store Mayotte’s initial deliveries of 950 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines. More remittances have arrived 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 the young population of Mayotte – only 4% is over 60 – meant that the region was a low priority for vaccination, noting its “demographic and geographical realities that are obviously of the continent.
But now that infections are on the rise, France’s central government is increasingly concerned.
Doctors are transporting several ICU patients a day to neighboring Reunion Island. The French military on Sunday brought in medical workers. The regional health service is organizing water deliveries to encourage the poorest to stay at home.
Many islands and countries in the Indian Ocean on the African continent are experiencing similar outbreaks – or worse – and delays in vaccines.
Madagascar, with 27 million inhabitants, still does not have vaccines. Mozambique, with 30 million inhabitants, imposed a curfew to fight a wave driven by the dominant variant in South Africa, and also has no vaccines. Neither do the neighboring islands of Comoros, for its population of 850,000.
The largest country in the region, South Africa, with 60 million inhabitants, recorded more than 1.47 million cases, including more than 46,800 deaths. His health minister announced on Wednesday that the government will distribute the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which has not yet been approved. for healthcare professionals after a short test showed that the AstraZeneca vaccine offers only minimal protection against the country’s dominant variant.
Mayotte’s lawmaker, Mansour Kamardine, does not understand why his homeland is in such a dire situation.
When the rest of the Comorian island chain voted in the 1970s for independence from France, after a century and a half of colonial rule, the residents 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” for everyone in France’s overseas lands.
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 to plead for more permanent ICU beds, to no avail. The whole territory is only 16.
Mayotte is among nine territories – mainly French – with a special status in the EU as an “outermost region”, who have 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 vaccine problems and a prolonged economic crisis, Mayotte’s prospects look bleak.
Stacks of red plastic Coca-Cola chairs collect dust in a palm-shaded Mamoudzou café, where a sign points to Tokyo, 11,230 kilometers (almost 7,000 miles) away. Metal railings hide showcases. Business travel and tourism plummeted as the pandemic progressed.
At the Caribou restaurant, bar and hotel, Chaima Nombamba manages the take-away counter – the only business unit still authorized to operate.
The hotel closed due to “a flood of cancellations”. Most restaurant employees are temporarily unemployed – a French government coronavirus program that those in the informal economy don’t like.
“Yes, the health crisis is very serious and has a deadly impact on some of us. But is it time to punish small businesses, notably our sector of activity, which is hard hit, which is being killed little by little, little by little? ” she asked.
“We don’t know what tomorrow will bring. We cannot make plans or anticipate certain things because it is changing every day, ”she said. “So, where’s the solution?”
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Charlton reported from Paris. Andrew Meldrum in Johannesburg contributed.