Mayotte’s main tourist office is almost empty, a lonely tropical place overlooking an uninhabited port.
His only hospital, however, is overcrowded.
Demand for ICU space has more than tripled supply, as physicians are fighting to contain the worst coronavirus outbreak in the French Indian Ocean region.
The Mayotte Islands are the poorest corner of the European Union, between Madagascar and the coast of mainland Mozambique in southern Africa, and the last place in the block to get any coronavirus vaccines.
Local authorities feel they have been forgotten, and say their difficulties in fighting the virus are a long-standing inequality between France’s vast white mainland and the old colonies where there is mostly color.
The French army is installing medical devices and a few ICU beds, but the temporary relief has so far failed on the islands where there are luxury masks, where nearly a third of the 300,000 population has no running water. , where a new lock suffers a living.
Last week, Mayotte’s economic authorities closed down, ordering people to stay at home to counter the fast-growing causes of South Africa’s dominant virus variant.
As ocean waves lie empty beaches and police roam the quiet streets of Mamoudzou industrial district, many people in the Bandrajou neighborhood appear to be unaware of protection rules.
Patches of children play barefoot on the dusty ground, girls carry a bucket on their head to get water from a collection pump, an older woman at an informal street stall combs younger women’s hair.
Almost none of them wear a mask.
Mayotte’s weekly disease rate is now nearly four times higher than the French national average.
The region has recorded 11,447 virus cases since the outbreak began – a third of them over the past two weeks – and at least 68 deaths, twice the per capita virus death rate nationwide.
That further disappointed us that Mayotte was the last area in France to receive vaccines, a month after the first doses landed in Paris, more than 8,400 kilometers (5,000 miles) away.
The French Foreign Legion delivered the super-freezer needed to store Mayotte’s original delivery of 950 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines.
More shipments have entered, and so far the area has vaccinated about 2,400 of its people, or less than 1%.
In Paris, government spokesman Gabriel Attal initially said Mayotte’s young population – just 4% above 60 – made the region a low priority for vaccines, noting the “Demographically and geographically distinctly different” from the mainland.
But now that diseases are rampant, the central government is more concerned.
Doctors transport several ICU patients daily to a nearby Reunion island. The French army on Sunday was flown in messengers.
The regional health service is arranging water deliveries to encourage the poorest people to stay at home.
Many Indian Ocean islands and countries on the African mainland are experiencing outbreaks – or worse – and vaccine delays.
When the rest of the Comoros archipelago voted in the 1970s for independence from France 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 on the French mainland – one of the richest countries in the world.
The region uses the euro as its border currency and is represented in the European Parliament.
A law in 2003 promised “freedom, equality and brotherhood” to all on French overseas territory.
Mansour Kamardine, a Mayotte lawyer, wrote to the government to appeal for more permanent, useless ICU beds.
There are only 16 in all.
Mayotte is one of nine regions – mostly French – with a special status in the EU as an “outermost region,” with access to development funding that targets the economic gap with the continent. leave Europe from colonial times.
But with Europe now facing its own vaccine ponds and prolonged economic crisis, Mayotte’s expectations look low.
Business travel and tourism have fallen as the pandemic has declined.
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