- Pandemic Coronavirus: Breaking News
- Argentina: Cristina Kirchner falls silent before an Argentina that is heading for a great crisis
There are just over 6,000 people spread across the planet, two sites well aware of the dangers of the coronavirus, although with great differences: if respect prevails among the 3,200 inhabitants of the Falkland Islands, among the 3,000 on Easter Island fear, strong fear.
Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui by its original inhabitants, already has two cases, while the Falklands still do not register any. In Hanga Roa, the capital of the remote Polynesian island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, there is anger with the authorities of Chile, the country to which the mythical land of the Moais belongs, those enormous faces carved in stone whose origin dates back centuries.
" I have a community that is protesting on the street. What do they expect in the government?" The phrase is from Pedro Edmund, mayor of Pascua and the highest authority on the island. He said this in mid-March, when there were still no cases in his community. The people of Easter Island pressed for the flights that connect the island with Chile and Tahiti, a French overseas possession, to be cut off in Santiago, the country's capital, 3,500 kilometers away, because the virus was already in both places. Today the environment changed into resignation and anger: the virus finally arrived on the island, and not precisely by plane.
" We have a positive case that cannot be traced , which does not correspond to a person who recently came from somewhere else to Easter Island, but is a case that originated locally," recently admitted Chilean Health Minister Jaime Mañalich. "The fact that he was a local person, with no contact with visitors to the island, only suggests that the disease may be more widespread than we know," Edmunds said. Then a second case would be confirmed, and many others are under study. The island and its inhabitants depend almost entirely on tourism, an activity that does not exist today, and which will continue without returning until the health emergency has entered into the process of solution. The political leaders of Easter Island believe that in no more than a month important sectors of the population will be asking for food on the streets . Today, Rapa Nui lives in total quarantine and with a curfew between two in the afternoon and five in the morning.
The situation is different in the Malvinas, an archipelago 500 kilometers from the Argentine coast whose sovereignty Buenos Aires has claimed for almost 200 years. The islands, constantly swept by the wind and in which summer is almost non-existent as a season, enjoy a high economic well-being and a standard of living that, paradoxically, must be thanked in large part by Argentines: it was the Falklands War. that made London, from 1982, take care of those islands that were forgotten. Fishing, mining and agriculture , and some tourist cruises to Antarctica, sustain the economy of the Falklands, which refuse with special pride to almost any link with Argentina.
"The Government of the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) has put in place a solid plan to deal with COVID-19. When there are problems that require additional support, we will work with the government of the United Kingdom," the authorities of the islands responded to Buenos Aires. when the Argentine government offered them help in the face of the crisis.
Not yet able to carry out the coronavirus tests, the Falklands must send the samples to London, 13,000 kilometers away, but the only place in the world with which they have an air connection, since the flights to Chile and Brazil had a stopover. in Argentina they were canceled. The 28 cases tested so far were negative.
Refugees in their homes, the Falklands manage to quarantine . This is the case of Lisa Watson, the editor of the only local newspaper, the "Penguin News". Young and athletic, although asthmatic, Watson is considered a person at high risk for the virus. He cannot go mountain climbing with his friends, as he usually does. Solution? An arena was built on the inner walls of the house. Climb, climb and fall on properly prepared mattresses. Over and over, as she and her fellow citizens wait for Covid-19 to forget about one of the most isolated territories on the planet.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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