It may be called the great unexpected benefits of having a beauty pageant! The newly instated Miss Samoa beauty queen was the fair damsel Fono McFarland-Seumanu.
However she did not enjoy her benefits and glories of being a queen of all beauties in the island nation as Samoa was struck with a deadly measles outbreak, killing a relatively significant 83 number of the nationals in the process, most of them being newborns and infants. Considering the population of 200,000, the damage was indeed hardblowing, and Samoa was subsequently put in its own lockdown to carry out mass immunization to all the islanders. As a professional nurse, Fono had naught but her sense of duty ahead of her priorities, and she had helped the vaccination process to disseminate quickly, as she herself carried the toolkit home from home to quell the overflow at the hospitals. Soon, the outbreak was contained, but she had stayed long enough to give out vaccines to children needing the desperately needed preventive methods.
She has gone on long campaigns to fight the diseases and has went on foot to rural villages. And now as the world is swarmed by the coronavirus epidemic, she credits her nation’s premeditated lockdown in the key survival tip for not having even a single infected person inside the isles.
Samoa is one of the very few nations which has not suffered a single case of contracting the virus. Fono, 24, said: ‘I think the whole world has learned from this measles epidemic here in Samoa from what we’ve gone through. That’s evident in the way that everyone has responded to the coronavirus.
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The measles crisis shook up healthcare in Samoa and caused the government to take a hard look at its public health system.
Take Naseri, the director general of health at the Ministry of Health had said in a press interview: ‘After an [measles] outbreak that killed 90 we are not taking the coronavirus threat lightly.’
In January they introduced a quarantine site at Faleolo hospital next to the country’s only international airport. By mid-February anyone travelling via China or Hong Kong was not admitted into Samoa unless they had quarantined for two weeks at their last port of call.
Some passengers were turned back on arrival. This list of countries was extended as the virus spread. In March the country went into a state of emergency and banned gatherings of more than five people and later all international travel.
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Replaced!