WHILE WORLD PARTIED SOME PLACES PREPARED. WILL THEIR GAMBLE PAY OFF?

SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO: While spring-breakers were still cramming South Beach bars in Florida earlier this month, Puerto Rico’s government was trying to turn the tourism-dependent island into an inhospitable fortress.

Starting March 16, Governor Wanda Vazquez shut down the island’s beaches, clubs and all “nonessential businesses.” She closed schools, government, imposed a nighttime curfew and required all residents and visitors to stay indoors through the end of the month. (Vazquez on Thursday extended the lockdown for an additional two weeks.)

This week, she finally got permission from the federal government to close down all but one airport to commercial aviation, forcing incoming passengers to run a gauntlet of health screeners who are informing them that they must spend their first two weeks indoors and isolated.

“You can’t do any activity that requires you to leave your hotel or home,” Vazquez warned potential visitors again this week. “We’re recommending that you don’t travel during the emergency.”

While much of the US mainland is just starting to take serious measures to stop the propagation of the coronavirus, Puerto Rico has been an outlier, putting up bolder barriers faster than perhaps any other US jurisdiction.

And it joins a small hemispheric club that includes Jamaica, El Salvador, Peru and a handful of others that responded to the crisis with forceful measures that seemed excessive just days ago but now seem prescient.

Jamaica was one of the first countries in the Caribbean to react to coronavirus, after seeing its first case on March 10. The country barred flights from hot zones, restricted the movement of tourists, enforced quarantines for all new arrivals and cancelled school, among other measures. It also put part of an entire town, Bull Bay, on lockdown.

Now, while Jamaica has 25 coronavirus cases, neighbouring Cuba has 48 and the Dominican Republic has at least 312, according to Pan American Health Organization.

While health professionals say such draconian, isolating measures are the only true safeguard against a novel virus, it’s still too soon to tell if the strategy is truly working.

“As Latin America and the Caribbean is only just beginning to experience cases (and) transmission of Covid-19, it is far too early to evaluate the effect of any distancing measures that particular countries put in place,” said

Ashley Baldwin, a spokeswoman for the Pan American Health Organization. Even so, “physical distancing measures are an important way of slowing down the spread of the virus and buying time,” she said. “To defeat the virus, countries need aggressive and targeted tactics — testing every suspected case, isolating and caring for every confirmed case, and tracing and quarantining every close contact.”

That’s easier said than done. Like many countries, the region is largely flying blind. Despite promises to begin rapid testing in Puerto Rico, doctors complain that tests are hard to find and it can take days to get results. Puerto Rico has 64 cases of the coronavirus and has reported two deaths, but government officials said there are likely at least 600 additional cases, undetected on the island.

While governments that acted fast are now being praised, there has been pushback.

Peru, which closed its borders, declared a national quarantine on March 16 and called out the army to enforce the lockdown, has had to arrest more than 16,000 people for violating the order. In Colombia, street vendors have been protesting — close to rioting — over lockdown rules that began this week. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, who shut down the country’s borders and airport on March 14, before the country had seen its first COVID-19 case, has faced stiff political opposition.

“The world IS NOT doing enough to stop the virus. Its advance is ruthless and it has already brought the world’s most powerful countries to their knees,” Bukele wrote on Wednesday. “We’re also not doing enough. The worst part is that there are people complaining that we’re being too strict. They don’t understand anything.”

Puerto Rico blunted some of the anger by rolling out a $787 million aid package on Monday that will put cash in the hands of workers and small businesses crippled by the economic shutdown.

Despite the global calls for more and bolder measures, it’s still unclear if total lockdowns are the answer, said Richard Besser, the president and chief executive of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the former interim director of the Centers for Disease Controland Prevention. “Shutting down society, shutting down the economy, has a major impact on peoples’ lives and affects those on the margins the most,” he said. “We’re asking people to choose between putting food on the table and paying rent, or staying home and protecting their health.”