Long free of COVID-19, Pacific islands now facing outbreaks
BANGKOK — For more than two years, the isolation of the Pacific archipelago nation of Tonga helped keep COVID-19 at bay.
But last month’s volcanic eruption and tsunami brought outside deliveries of desperately needed fresh water and medicine — and the virus.
Now the country is in an open-ended lockdown, which residents hope will help contain the small outbreak.
“We have pretty limited resources, and our hospitals are pretty small,” Tongan business owner Paula Taumoepeau said last Friday. “But I’m not sure any health system can cope. We are lucky we’ve had two years to get our (vaccination) rate pretty high, and we had a pretty immediate lockdown.”
Tonga is one of several Pacific countries to experience their first outbreaks over the past month. All have limited health care resources, and there is concern that the remoteness that once protected them may now make helping them difficult.
“Clearly when you’ve got countries that have already got a very stretched and fragile health system, when you have an emergency or a disaster and then you have the potential introduction of the virus, that’s going to make an already serious situation immeasurably worse,” said John Fleming, the Asia-Pacific head of health for the Red Cross.
Tonga was coated with ash following the Jan. 15 eruption of the undersea Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha’apai volcano, then hit with a tsunami that followed.
Only three people have been confirmed killed, but several small settlements in outlying islands were wiped out and the ash tainted much of the drinking water.
The nation of 105,000 had reported only one case of COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic — a missionary returning to the island from Africa via New Zealand who tested positive in October — and authorities debated whether to let international aid in.
They decided they had to, but despite strict precautions unloading ships and planes from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Britain and China, two Tongan men who worked at the capital’s Queen Salote Wharf handling shipments tested positive last Tuesday.
The two were moved into isolation, but in tests of 36 possible contacts, one’s wife and two children also tested positive, while the others tested negative, the Matangi Tonga news site reported.
It was not clear how many people might have come into contact with the dockworkers, but the government released a list of locations where the virus could have spread, including a church, shops, a bank and a kindergarten.
Prime Minister Siaosi Sovaleni imposed an open-ended lockdown last Wednesday.
One of the infected dock workers has since tested negative, but remains in quarantine, and 389 others have been cleared of COVID-19, Sovaleni told reporters in Tonga. But he Friday that a primary contact to one of those infected had tested positive, and ordered the lockdown extended another 48 hours.