A refreshing optimism is leading to an unspeakable heartbreak.
The “opening up” of almost every part of the world irrespective of its virus case situation brings much hope to those out of work. This is most clear in my trade in Africa. “Out of work” is bad even for the car company executive, but on an individual level what may happen in Africa is exponentially more terrifying than here at home.
In a wildfire if you have the capability you dump the water on the largest blazes. When we get a vaccine will we direct the first doses to the worst outbreaks?
It’s daunting trying to predict where the worst outbreaks are now much less where they will be. Using Statista today the U.S., all of Europe and the U.K. are at the top of the list for deaths per capita, yet there is not a single African country, or Southeast Asian country in the top 50.
How can that be?
Sunday afternoon the Tanzanian president urged foreigners to come right now to Tanzania “to visit the wildife.”
In marked contrast neighboring Kenya closed all its airports and just last week all border posts with Tanzania after nearly 80% of all Tanzanian truckers trying to enter the country tested positive for Covid-19. “There is some level of threat from the Tanzanian side,” Kenya’s chief health officer told the press Monday. “We keep out those who [are] positive,” he added.
I’m betting that a vaccine will be ready by the first of the year and that Kenya, South Africa and a number of other sub-Saharan countries will require all travelers to prove they are vaccinated in order to gain entry.
But what will you find once you get in?
I can’t convince myself there will be a second wave. I can’t convince myself that a vaccine will be available the first of next year. I guess in fact I can’t convince myself of much. Except one thing: African tourism is imploding so severely that it will gut the global market for safaris for decades to come.
Half of the 2019 African tourism will not exist in a year. By the end of 2021 there will be an unprecedented transformation rolling back decades of trends. (More on this later this week.)
Strict government actions in Africa to protect the population against Covid-19 make America’s actions look like a slap-on-the-wrist. Who’s right?
Today America errs on the side of economics over optimal minimizing of the infection. It’s absolutely the reverse in Africa. Is this just a difference of perception? Or morality? Is it a realistic debate over long-term well-being? Or something much more insidious, such as the personal well-being of our leaders?
China and America are toeing up at the post-virus starting line at the continent of Africa, and it’s pitiful how out of shape Americans are. Mike Pompeo and the State Department rely on a tried and true Trump technique of dominance: lie until it’s believed. But Africans aren’t as dumb as Americans.
Open up? We privileged have more latitude implementing our morality than our poor bloke cousins. Alas, the current partisan pandemic. The growing impression is that Covid-19 is a rich man’s sickness, and ‘god forbid, let them die.’
No better magnification glass on this painful dilemma than what’s happening in Africa.
Ready for a new threat? It’s just as ethereal and deadly as Covid-19. It strips away our naive precautions just as efficiently and wrecks havoc far beyond its relatively short existence when it’s finally put under control. In a word, “worse” than the virus. I rely specifically on my African experience to tell you about this.
I experienced it mostly in troubled times and situations, a singular threat to my protecting my group. But it also walloped me when I least expected it, when everything around me seemed just so perfect and peaceful.
Rage.
Sometimes it’s better to let your brain suppress your gut. Better than Rolaids. It’s what I have to do when contemplating the virus in Africa.
There’s an enormous disconnect between what my gut tells me about the dangers of Covid-19 and what my brain does. The numbers on the continent are – and I suppose this is the point – ridiculously low. But numbers in Africa are like snow flakes in a cotton field. They rarely appear and when they do, they’re very hard to find.
The first insurance claim made by an EWT traveler that we know of was March 3. This morning that claimant said they received acknowledgment of their claim but as of today the claim had not been reviewed.
It doesn’t look very promising. The situation is similar with the airlines. Here is a brief summary of what EWT clients have explained to me regarding their various insurances.
You’d think it was a Gucci purse. Large pocketbook size, beautifully encased in a thick wet brown leather case stylishly pierced symmetrically, its oversize steel buttons were actually easy to open, hard to close. Wish now I’d saved it, but when the antenna broke I ditched it.
My Grundig Shortwave Radio. I’ve been thinking nostalgically about MGSR recently as I read with increasing terror the “professional” advice that we should consume less media in this time of such unrelenting stress and anxiety. The fact is that we should all be consuming more.
“Is theese Bwana Jimmee?!” the crackling telephone kept screaming at me, to which I replied in French, that yes, I was the safari guide, Jim Heck, to which the enthusiastic person on the other line screamed again, “Is theese Bwana Jimmee?!!!”
Didn’t know what to do. I’d really been looking forward to a few hours off, basically just reading in my little room in the Mille Collines. I’d sent my group out on their own to stroll Kigali. I started to lose interest until the message changed, delivered by the same high-pitched screech, “Friends arrested!!”
I know something about chloroquine. It was the reason I first got malaria.
It’s also the reason I’ve lost about 50% of the vision in my right eye. I listen with malaria shivers to a TV president espousing chloroquine as our vial of hope, and I’ve come to realize that it isn’t just evil that’s destroying our world, today. It’s also hope.
You can’t travel for a year.
Nothing is available to suggest an older person will feel comfortable traveling very far from her home until she’s vaccinated against Covid-19, and Spring 2021 is likely the earliest this will happen. But once that sunrise arrives, you better be well prepared for what the fields will look like.
This is the final in a series of three blogs about managing your travel in the era of Covid-19. To fully understand these recommendations about your future travel, please carefully read first the previous two blogs.