Dubai hub a serious health concern as three visitors and one Seychellois test positive for COVID19

Last week Seychelles recorded four new positive cases of COVID19. These included one Seychellois from Praslin. A 57 year old male who had been admitted to the Baie Ste Anne hospital and been tested. The other three are all visitors who came into the country from Dubai. They were identified through their exit PCR test, which is mandatory before anyone travels out of Seychelles. The three visitors had tested negative during their inbound test, which raised a lot of questions among the public as to the validity of those tests.Contact tracing for those cases are already well underway with the Praslin case seeing over 75 people already covered. The Health authorities also had to clarify that a death, which occurred at the same clinic where the infected citizen was admitted on the day he was discovered as being positive, had nothing to do with COVID. The two men had not had any known contact, but as a precaution the remains of the deceased is also being tested.

Public Health Commissioner said the situation now has made local authorities impose new measures. Henceforth anyone Seychellois or visitor, who enter the country will have to undergo mandatory testing five days after arrival. All Seychellois coming in from high risk countries will have to go into quarantine while the visitors who hail from the medium to low risk countries will stay in their hotels and take the test on the fifth day. Seychellois coming in from medium risk countries go into home quarantine then do their test on the fifth day.However, it is not sure if this method will help contain the spread of imported corona virus infection since as Dr. Gedeon put it himself, Dubai is a high risk country and at the same time it is a very important international hub for Seychelles be it for travel or commerce. It is clear that the health authorities are caught between a rock and a hard place as they try to balance out national health security and the national economic survival.Since Dubai is a high risk country now hitting at 900 infected cases daily, the public is understandably worried and the measures have not really reassured anyone. This is especially because initially visitors who came here had to remain within the boundaries of their hotels for two weeks, but when the country officially re-opened to commercial flights this was eased. Other regulation saying visitors must have very limited access to the general public and the mandatory wearing of masks are also not being implemented properly.

On the other hand, after a lot of waffling, the health authorities have finally put their actions where their words are and have sent final advisory letters to those establishments and businesses which have continuously disregarded and flaunted regulations in place to ensure public safety. After the recent outbreak the Department of Health has also stepped up its testing among the population.Meanwhile the public has been caught up in a whirlpool of alleged cases and related rumors, leaving a sense of confusion and even fear. The health authorities have continuously denied that there are positive cases of COVID19 at those three resorts where the over 500 Arab visitors from the UAE are holidaying. The hotels are off limits to outsiders and even the Seychellois workers have signed to remain there for the duration of the stay of the guests. The extent of the rumors forced Dr. Jude Gedeon to say that “some people are determined to give us cases which we do not have!”