Monitoring Desk
PORT-AU-PRINCE: Haitian pastor Burel Fontilus feared for his life in late March when he contracted the new coronavirus. It wasn’t the COVID-19 respiratory disease that frightened him, he said, rather gun-toting vigilantes in his neighborhood near Port-au-Prince who were threatening to lynch him.
Word that Fontilus, 42, had fallen ill while traveling quickly morphed into accusations on social media that he was carelessly spreading it. “They were gathering to kill me,” Fontilus told Reuters. “Neighbors said they had seen groups preparing.” Reuters was unable to verify independently Fontilus’ claims that an armed mob in his suburb of Carrefour was organizing to harm him.
Carrefour Police Commissioner Charles Maunaude said authorities took the alleged threats against Fontilus seriously. Police were dispatched near his home to pre-empt any potential aggression, Maunaude said, while a squad car escorted the ambulance that took Fontilus to the local hospital. Around the world, sufferers of coronavirus and health professionals have faced stigma due to fear and ignorance. Medical workers in the Philippines have had bleach thrown at them. Doctors in India have been forcefully evicted by their landlords over infection fears.
In Haiti though, the poorest country in the Americas, that stigma has become a major concern among health authorities trying to contain the outbreak. Haitians have long been distrustful of their institutions, wariness that a corruption-fueled political crisis, food insecurity and a surge in gang crime have only exacerbated. Now fear of contracting coronavirus has some taking matters into their own hands. “The only way they feel they can be saved from COVID-19 is by eliminating those who have it,” Fontilus said. He said he has recovered. But he refuses to return home, instead relocating with his family from the home of one friend to another so that his would-be attackers can’t track him down. Fontilus has good reason to be cautious.
Violence erupted during the last major epidemic, a nearly decade-long cholera outbreak that began in 2010; more than 800,000 people were sickened and around 10,000 died. At least 45 priests of Haiti’s voodoo religion were killed, some hacked to death, by mobs who blamed them for causing it with their spells, the government said at the time. Coronavirus so far has proven far less lethal that cholera. Haiti has registered just 182 cases to date and 15 deaths. But harassment of patients such as Fontilus poses a major challenge to authorities trying to get those who contract COVID-19 to come forward for treatment.
“The fight against stigmatization is our greatest battle,” said Laure Adrien, General Director of Haiti’s Health Ministry and co-chief of the commission managing the outbreak. President Jovenel Moise said in an April 27 address to the nation that the government would not tolerate violence against coronavirus sufferers. Yet Haitians say the state is too weak to stop the perpetrators.
One of Haiti’s few well-equipped hospitals, the Bernard Mevs in Port-au-Prince, canceled plans to open a center for treating coronavirus patients due to opposition by local residents who feared it would be a vector for contagion, an administrative staffer told Reuters. Other Haitian hospitals and clinics face similar opposition, according to Carissa Etienne, director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), an international body devoted to improving public health in the Americas. People “are actually obstructing the access to be able to set up COVID health facilities, and threatening to burn them and to attack the healthcare workers,” Etienne said during a weekly regional briefing on Tuesday. “The lack of security at those facilities is a huge issue.”
COVID-19 survivor Gyliane Woel told Reuters the state ambulance service recently sent her home in the dead of night from the hospital that treated her in Mirebalais, just north of the capital, stressing it was for own safety. Didie Herold, director of Haiti’s National Ambulance Centre, denied that. He said some drop-offs occur at odd hours because the service has only four or five ambulances devoted to transporting COVID-19 patients in the area around Port-au-Prince.
Haiti’s relative isolation and last year’s political unrest have helped keep its case count low to date, health experts said, as international travelers have stayed away. But they said the outbreak could yet explode in the vulnerable, densely populated Caribbean island nation of 11 million. Thousands of Haitian migrant laborers are now returning from the neighboring Dominican Republic, one of the worst-affected regions in Latin America, after losing their incomes during lockdown. Basic sanitation is a challenge in Haiti’s vast slums and rural hinterlands. Health care services were already collapsing before the pandemic due to lack of financing. (Reuters)
