His name is Kedar Sharma and he is the general manager of a construction firm. He went to India to attend to some family business and flew back to Mauritius on a flight via Dubai. He landed in our island on October 3rd, not suspecting in the least what he was about to go through.

He was initially tested negative and was placed in a hotel room to serve his 14-day sentence without stepping out. As he started resigning himself to that, his 7-day test came out positive. So he was immediately shipped off to the ENT hospital where his ordeal was about to start. He was first placed in a common ward. When he requested a private room, he was sent to a cell with no window and no natural light where he was forced to stay until – hold your breath – November 5th! Every time he tested positive, his sentence was prolonged for another week. All in all, Sharma spent over a month in quarantine! Tell me which doctor can look us straight in the eye and tell us that the person would have been a risk for anyone for that whole period. During that time, he was denied the right to quarantine in a private hospital – paid by him – and even to take an ‘independent’ test – paid by him.

This story is unfortunately not unique. Our compatriot Claire Le Lay went through a similar ordeal, though thankfully, it was slightly shorter. And there are still people in our ENT hospital who are perfectly healthy looking but have to lie down on a bed for days not knowing when their prison sentence will come to an end. The only thing they have to look forward to is the weekly nasal swab. Imagine that!

I messaged both Catherine Gaud and Zouberr Joomaye. The former must have become so important in our country that she did not deem it fit to reply. Joomaye at least had the decency to answer, though he hid behind the protocol which he “cannot change”. One of our compatriots who set up a group to discuss issues in quarantine, Catherine LeClézio, even wrote to the representative of the World Health Organisation. There was nothing done. Protocol is protocol. It doesn’t matter how meaningless it is. You have to go through it.

The result? Google ‘quarantine’ today, which is what you want to do if you were thinking of visiting Mauritius one day, and you will be treated to similar horror stories. Similar stories are being silenced by fear and trauma. Sharma himself refused to talk to us and we had to find a round-about way to get the information.

Now, google anyone of our competitors and compare. And instead of scoffing at the 1,600 tourists visiting the Seychelles, let’s learn to analyse figures. Considering that the Seychelles only re-opened its borders in August, by September, these high-end tourists – who are staying for much longer – were already bringing in 60% of the income the Seychelles received in September 2019, according to very reliable sources from there! That’s huge in these tough times.

Some tourism operators here are talking about losing the war to competitors. In fact, we are not even on the battlefront. Our competitors have a strategy and a plan. We have rules and protocols cast in stone. Our competitors rely on science and the latest findings about Covid-19. We are stuck in January 2020. Our competitors’ aim is weighing up the sanitary risks of Covid against the dangers of an economic slump. Our aim is to be able to repeat the nonsensical sentence, “We are Covid-free” while thumping our chests. In the meantime, we are shooting ourselves in the foot every bit of the way.