American Samoa tried submitting samples to the nearest public health lab in Hawaii, some 2,300 miles away, officials said. After the patient didn’t meet that state’s testing criteria, the health dept turned to the CDC in Atlanta, more than 6,500 miles away
and an action plan to combat the pandemic on its shores to the U.S. Department of the Interior, Vice President Mike Pence and other public health and government officials. In his letter, Gov. Lolo Moliga highlighted that the territory would struggle in coping with a highly contagious disease such as the coronavirus.
“There is great fear that our healthcare service delivery system could collapse if the projections and estimates on the percentage of people who will be infected in any community hold true,” Moliga wrote. With a population similar in size to American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands also has a single hospital, with a smaller capacity -- just 86 beds total. While it has no positive cases yet and has only tested four patients, authorities are preparing for what could be a devastating outbreak. “The biggest challenge out there is we’re far away from the continental U.S. Everything comes by ship,” said Warren Villagomez, the head of its coronavirus task force. The territory requested supplies such as masks and other protective equipment from the strategic national stockpile, but has to wait for them to arrive. “It’s 15-17 days of shipping for anything to get here.” Preparing for an emergency, the territory has set up triage tents outside the one hospital and taken precautions such as screening travelers arriving in the islands. But that may not be enough. “With only four ICU beds for the entire CNMI, preexisting nursing shortages, and a supply chain that’s strained by airline route closures, COVID-19 could readily overwhelm our scarce resources,” said Doctor Alexandra Pulst-Korenberg, an emergency physician at the territory’s hospital, the Commonwealth Health Care Corporation., health risk factors and premature death, compared to other U.S. population groups. American Samoa faced a measles outbreak late last year, prompting dozens of health care workers from Hawaii to flood the territory and the CDC to send a shipment of the measles vaccine. The territory has a much higher rate of obesity and the Northern Mariana Islands has more than double the rate of high blood pressure as the 50 U.S. states and D.C. Those health risks, combined with their distance from the rest of the country, weaker public health infrastructure, technology limitations and small, dispersed populations, could make the territories’ populations more vulnerable to COVID-19. “As a tropical island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, it would only take a few extra critically ill patients to put us in crisis,” Pulst-Korenberg said.
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