Covid-19 at the present time has been a global pandemic, with many traumatic consequences. There have been more than 55.4 million people worldwide infected, 1.33 million deaths – numbers show the horrors that this pandemic brings.
A pandemic of the world. But the surprising thing is that there are still a number of countries on this planet that have not recorded any infections.
Specifically, according to official information recorded from Johns Hopkins University, as of November 13, there are 9 countries in the world that have not been touched by Covid-19. Except for Korea and Turkmenistan, the remaining 7 countries are island states in the South Pacific, including: Kiribati, Palau, Micronesia, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Samoa, and Tonga.
The reason for this achievement is not because these are countries with strong health care, but in the story of “geography”. Their separate position from the rest of the world is their best shield from the pandemic. However, things are also slowly changing.
On November 11, Vanuatu Island recorded the first new infections, along with cases in Fiji and Solomon Islands. So 8 months after the announcement of the global pandemic, Covid-19 is slowly reaching the most remote territories.
Most of the island states in the Pacific Ocean soon closed their borders shortly after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The simple reason was because, they would not be able to withstand Covid-19 if a pandemic broke out there.
The good news is that since Covid-19 takes a long time to arrive, they will have time to prepare, especially to prevent the virus from appearing in the first place. According to Lana Elliott, a Pacific Public Health specialist at the Queensland University of Technology (Australia), the Vanuatu case is expected to be the only case, and the disease can be contained there. Until this moment, epidemic outbreaks have given the island nation of more than 300,000 inhabitants a period of precaution.
“Vanuatu, like so many other small island nations in the Pacific, can not withstand even a few infections,” – Colin Tukuitonga, associate professor of medicine at the University of Auckland. “Cases appearing on a small island can quickly overwhelm the health system that is not strong. They lack the critical equipment, as well as the skills of the physicians.”