On islands once spared, COVID outbreak raises inequality
NOUMÉA, New Caledonia — Festooned with hibiscus flowers and woven palm fronds, scores of guests gathered for a celebration during New Caledonia’s wedding season. The aroma of grilled fish and yams bathed in coconut milk wafted over the revelers on the island of Lifou, population 10,000.
The celebration on the atoll in late August seemed safe. For a year and a half, New Caledonia, a French territory in the South Pacific, had escaped the coronavirus pandemic. Quarantines and border controls kept the virus out, just like they had done during the worst of the influenza pandemic a century earlier.
“None of us expected COVID to come here,” said Marie-Janne Issamatro, 56, who spent 40 days in the hospital with COVID-19, after attending the family wedding on Lifou. “The doctors say I am the miracle lady because I wasn’t supposed to survive.”
But by mid-September, the delta variant was racing across New Caledonia, home to about 270,000 people. Of the nearly 13,300 people who tested positive within the span of a few weeks, more than 280 people died, a higher mortality rate than what the United States or France experienced last year.
Fueled by the omicron variant, the coronavirus is now reaching parts of the South Pacific that had avoided the pandemic for nearly two years. More than 1,000 people have been infected in Tonga, the transmission likely catalyzed by ships bringing in aid supplies after a volcanic eruption and tsunami in January. Kiribati and the Solomon Islands have contended with their first outbreaks. The Cook Islands reported its first case in late February.
Of all the South Pacific islands recently struggling with outbreaks, New Caledonia was among the most inundated, prompting the government to declare a state of emergency earlier this year. Less than 70 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated, despite plentiful supplies.
(The surge has eased in recent days.)
Serious coronavirus infections have disproportionately affected New Caledonians of Pacific Island descent, highlighting social inequalities in a territory that is agonizing over whether to break free of France.
High levels of diabetes, hypertension and obesity among people of South Pacific descent have compounded New Caledonia’s COVID-19 crisis, doctors said. The territory may be one of the richest places in the South Pacific, but the income gap is wide. Most of New Caledonia’s impoverished people are Melanesian Kanaks and Polynesian immigrants.
In January 2021, New Caledonia was one of the world’s first places to receive ample coronavirus vaccines. The territory had boosters available before much of France. Yet when delta hit, less than half of the population had been vaccinated.
“There is a closed island mentality, so people thought they were safe,” said Yannick Slamet, the health minister of New Caledonia. “People forget history quickly.”