I beg you to call off the January 11th flight. The risks are too high and there are no rewards.
If you consult the BBC or any other reliable source it can be clearly seen that Covid-19 is out-of-control in the UK. The new more-dangerous variant is causing a spike in infections and deaths. The NHS is struggling to cope. But at least UK residents have experience of operating social distancing and lockdowns. On St Helena we have no such experience, and a social distanced environment is completely alien to island culture. If Covid-19 reaches the island we will not have time to learn. The virus it will spread even more rapidly than it is doing in the UK. Our high proportion of vulnerable people will be at risk.
Everybody knows the island’s medical provisions are limited and if Covid-19 spreads here our health service would struggle to cope. Everybody involved would make heroic efforts to contain it and reduce the death-toll, but they are under-resourced and would quickly be overwhelmed.
And our defences against Covid-19 have been reduced. The chances that somebody arriving with the virus will be successfully detected and isolated from the community are lower now than they were.
Given all of the above, to justify the extreme risk of running the January flight there would need to be an overwhelming good reason to do so. What is that reason? There is nobody on that flight who is essential to island life. Yes, cancelling the flight would be inconvenient for the people scheduled to be on it, but not as inconvenient as it would be for the island to introduce Covid-19 here.
The costs are great; the benefits are negligible. I beg you: please cancel the January flight.
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