Tens of thousands of people may have died in the Mayotte archipelago after a devastating cyclone, and doctors are also preparing for an increase in illnesses, a dental surgeon at the only hospital there said on Tuesday (17).
Three days after Cyclone Chido devastated the French overseas territory off the coast of East Africa, the hospital’s emergency department did not receive a large number of injured people, leading them to fear the worst, said Naouelle Bouabbas.
“The fact that we didn’t see as many people injured from the cyclone when everything collapsed makes us think that all these people are still buried and dead,” she told Reutersin an interview via video call from the archipelago.
“We expect thousands, tens of thousands wouldn’t surprise me,” Bouabbas said, when asked about a possible death toll, adding that there was still no infrastructure to extract people from the rubble.
Authorities said hundreds or even thousands of people may have died, but only 22 deaths had been confirmed as of Tuesday morning, Ambdilwahedou Soumaila, mayor of the capital Mamoudzou, told French radio.
The Red Cross said on Tuesday that around 100,000 people were missing, including around 200 of its volunteers, after the cyclone hit the islands with winds of 200 km/h in the worst storm in 90 years.
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More than three-quarters of Mayotte’s roughly 321,000 residents live in relative poverty, and about a third are estimated to be undocumented immigrants, most from neighboring Comoros and Madagascar. Many are living in makeshift slums.
