American diplomats face risk of illness
WASHINGTON — The symptoms were more annoying than alarming: A dry cough, achiness and then sni±es developed a few days after Andrew Young, the U.S. ambassador to Burkina Faso, met with government officials and aid organizations to discuss how to protect the West African nation from the coronavirus.
A week later, Young was sealed in an isolation chamber and loaded into an evacuation flight out of the capital, Ouagadougou, as the first U.S. ambassador to learn he had the virus.
He is unlikely to be the last. Already, 154 State Department employees worldwide have tested positive for the virus, and more than 3,500 are symptomatic and in self-isolation, the vast majority of them serving in posts overseas.
The pursuit of diplomacy is mostly idealistic, if usually faceless and often thankless. But outside conflict zones, it is rarely deadly. Even the most placid assignments come with security guards and other protective measures.
The coronavirus has changed that.
Diplomats, whose very jobs are to interact with foreigners and represent 20 million Americans who are abroad at any given time, have been highly vulnerable to the pandemic as it swept around the world and into countries that have been slow to acknowledge its threat, many whose medical facilities are less than adequate to start.
Three State Department employees have died from the coronavirus so far, all of whom were foreign citizens who were hired by the embassies in their respective home nations. One was from Indonesia and another from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The State Department did not disclose Friday where the third person was from, except to say that he or she was not a U.S. citizen.
At the start of last week, there were only 43 kits available in Burkina Faso to test for coronavirus infections, Young said. The country currently has one of the highest numbers of infections in Africa: As of Friday, there were at least 288 confirmed cases and 16 deaths.
Young was evacuated March 25 on a flight that was chartered by the State Department to bring him and 120 healthy passengers home from Burkina Faso and Liberia. As soon as the plane landed at Dulles International Airport in the Virginia suburbs of Washington after a 29-hour journey, he was suited up in full biohazard gear and whisked off to a hospital for several days of treatment.
He considers himself lucky. And he wants to return to Burkina Faso as soon as the State Department will let him.
“My treatment is not the same treatment that your average Burkinabe will receive in the coming challenges, because the situation is going to get more difficult in the couple of weeks ahead of us,” Young said in an interview last week as he recovers at home in the Washington area. “So I carry that.”
So far, the State Department has brought back more than 38,000 citizens and their relatives — many of them tourists, students or Americans who live overseas. That includes about 6,000 diplomats and family members.
Another 22,000 U.S. citizens are still waiting, frustrated by the dwindling number of available flights, foreign regulations and other complications that have slowed their return.
At both ends of the process are U.S. diplomats who either are working abroad to get necessary departure permits from foreign governments or are part of a Washington-based task force focused on lining up transportation and health services for stranded citizens.
In some cases, that has meant renting buses to pick up Americans in remote locations and take them to the nearest international airport.
In others, it has involved negotiating with foreign officials to approve the flights when public airports are closed or allow cruise ships with U.S. citizens among infected passengers aboard to dock.