MAMOUDZOU, Mayotte (AP) – Mayotte’s main tourist office is nearly empty, a lonely tropical outpost overlooking a humanless harbor. However, the only hospital is overwhelmed.
The demand for intensive care beds has more than quadrupled as medical workers fight to contain the worst coronavirus outbreak yet in the French Indian Ocean.
The Mayotte Islands are the poorest corner of the European Union, tucked between Madagascar and the mainland coast of Mozambique in southern Africa – and were the last place in France to receive coronavirus vaccines.
Local authorities feel forgotten, saying their difficulties in fighting the virus reflect the long-standing inequality between majority white mainland France and its widespread multiracial former colonies.
The French military is sending medical workers and a few ICU beds, and President Emmanuel Macron’s government pledged on Wednesday to ramp up the supply of vaccines. But aid will only go so far in islands where masks are a luxury, where nearly a third of the region’s 300,000 people have no running water and where a new lockdown is suffocating livelihoods.
“We worked 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 who lives in a slum in the capital of Mayotte, Mamoudzou.
Last week, authorities shut down Mayotte’s economy by ordering people to stay at home to combat the fast-growing cases of the virus variant that is dominating South Africa.
“How can we live without work, without being able to move, without anything?” Soilihi asked.
While ocean waves skim over empty beaches and police patrol the quiet streets of Mamoudzou’s business district, many people in the Bandrajou neighborhood of Soilihi seem unaware of lockdown rules or social distance measures. Groups of children play barefoot on the dusty ground, girls carry buckets on their heads to get water from a collective pump, an elderly woman at an informal street stall braids the hair of a younger woman. Hardly anyone wears a mask.
Health professionals recognize that there is no easy solution.
The virus attacks Mayotte in a “brutal and swift” manner, Dominique Voynet, the head of the regional health department, told The Associated Press. “All indicators are getting darker and darker … people are falling like flies.”
Mayotte’s weekly infection rate is now almost four times higher than the national French average. The territory has recorded 11,447 virus cases since the start of the pandemic – a third of those in the past two weeks – and at least 68 deaths, double the nationwide per capita death rate. It is believed that many cases and deaths are not counted.
That 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 (5,000 miles) away.
“We were equipped much later than other (French) regions, much to my dismay,” said Voynet.
The French Foreign Legion provided the super freezer needed to store Mayotte’s first deliveries of 950 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines. More cargoes have seeped in and the area has so far inoculated 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% are over the age of 60 – meant the region had a low priority for vaccination, noting that the “demographic and geographic realities are markedly different” from the mainland.
But with infections raging, the French central government is increasingly concerned.
Doctors transport several IC patients to the nearby island of Réunion every day. The French army flew in medical workers on Sunday. The regional health service organizes water supplies to encourage the poorest to stay at home.
Many Indian Ocean islands and countries in mainland Africa are facing similar – or worse – outbreaks and vaccination delays.
Madagascar, with a population of 27 million, does not yet have any vaccines. Mozambique, with 30 million people, has imposed a curfew to combat a wave of the dominant variety in South Africa, and has no vaccines either. Neither is the nearby Comoros Islands with its 850,000 inhabitants.
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. The health minister announced on Wednesday that the government will distribute the unapproved Johnson & Johnson vaccine to health professionals after a small test showed that the AstraZeneca vaccine provides only minimal protection against the variant that is dominant in the country.
Mayotte lawmaker Mansour Kamardine doesn’t understand why his homeland is in such a dire situation.
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 residents of Mayotte voted overwhelmingly to remain French.
Today, Mayotte has the same administrative status as any other 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 “liberty, equality and fraternity” to all people in France’s overseas territories.
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 power.
He wrote to the government calling for more permanent IC beds, but to no avail. The entire territory has only 16.
Mayotte is one of nine territories – mostly French – with special status in the EU as an “outermost region”, who have access to development funds aimed at narrowing the economic divide with the European continent left over from colonial times.
But now that Europe is facing its own vaccination problems and ongoing economic crisis, Mayotte’s outlook seems bleak.
Piles 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 (nearly 7,000 miles) away. Metal grilles hide storefronts. Business travel and tourism have declined as the pandemic continues.
In the restaurant, bar and hotel Caribou, Chaima Nombamba manages the takeaway counter – the only part of the company that is still allowed to operate.
The hotel is closed due to “deluge of cancellations”. Most of the restaurant staff are on temporary unemployment – a coronavirus program from the French government that people in the informal economy don’t enjoy.
“Yes, the health crisis is very serious and has a deadly impact for some of us. But is this the time to punish small businesses, particularly our activity sector, which is really hit hard and killed little by little by small fires? she asked.
‘We don’t know what tomorrow will bring. We cannot make plans or anticipate certain things because it changes every day, ”she said. “So where’s the fix?”
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Angela Charlton reported from Paris. Andrew Meldrum in Johannesburg contributed to this report.