A nurse preparing to care for a patient with Covid-19 (illustration).
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FRED SCHEIBER / SIPA
It is a counter that the Wallis and Futuna Islands would not have wanted to see open.
The archipelago recorded its first death linked to Covid-19, after the death on Saturday of an octogenarian in this territory where a mass vaccination campaign of the entire population has just been launched, said the Higher Administration (prefecture) .
Covid-19 is not "the only cause" of death
The victim is an 83-year-old Futunian, who was evacuated to Sia hospital in Wallis for other pathologies from March 5 to 10.
She then tested positive for the coronavirus on March 15 and rehospitalized on Saturday for respiratory distress before succumbing, the senior administration said.
A doctor told Wallis and Futuna La 1ère television that Covid-19 "was not the sole cause" of the death of this octogenarian but "that the disease was necessarily linked".
This first death occurred on the day of the launch, in the Polynesian archipelago of about 11,500 inhabitants, of a massive vaccination campaign for the entire major population, due to a rapid spread of the epidemic since the detection on 6 last March of the first case.
There are now more than 300 cases, mostly on the island of Wallis.
Significant health reinforcements including 72 caregivers, 18,000 doses of vaccine and several tonnes of medical freight were sent from Metropolitan France but also from New Caledonia.
A “strict and controlled” confinement of the population, in force since March 9 for two weeks in Wallis and Futuna, has also been extended until April 6.
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