Guåhan (Guam)

The Indigenous people of Guam, or Taotao Guåhan, in the Marianas have survived many typhoons over their four millennia of habitation, including one of the most destructive, Pongsona, as recently as 2002. Some refer to the sheer devastation of new diseases introduced by colonialism, which nearly eradicated the Indigenous population in the late 1600s, as a typhoon itself. In 2020, a typhoon of yet another type—Coronavirus Disease 2019 (covid-19)—hit the island and the rest of the world, and the CHamoru people, along with the other residents, were again called on to show their resiliency in the face of change and danger.

The response to the virulent worldwide pandemic in Guåhan, led by former nurse Governor Lou Leon Guerrero, was signally different from the calamitous and chaotic misadministration of Guåhan’s colonizing occupier, the United States. Leon Guerrero repurposed the island’s familiar typhoon alert system, Condition of Readiness (cor), as the Pandemic Condition of Readiness (pcor) and closed down the island’s airports and tourism. As of June 2020, the island was still in pcor-2, and the governor stated that she would observe how Hawai‘i handled reopening in August (pit, 8 July 2020).

The occupation of the US military, with both naval and Air Force bases taking up nearly a third of the island’s landmass, once again led to the spread of disease, recalling the near-genocidal colonial past. The visit of thirty-five covid-19-infected US airmen to local establishments caused alarm, but the people of Guåhan, contrary to colonialist perceptions of Pacific and Asian countries as unclean or disease ridden, easily kept the pandemic under control. Leon Guerrero and medical advisor Dr Felix Cabrera, along with the Department of Public Health and Social Services, instituted contact tracing, which showed limited community spread (pit, 8 July 2020).

The first death on Guåhan from covid-19 was a sixty-eight-year-old woman on 22 March. Shortly thereafter, from 26 March to 2 April, Guåhan briefly became the epicenter of international news when US President Donald Trump verbally attacked Navy Commander Captain Brett Crozier. When hundreds of cases of infection were found on his US aircraft carrier, the nuclear-powered Theodore Roosevelt, which docked in Guåhan, Crozier notified admirals of the outbreak in a memo that was released to the press, asking them to unload and quarantine four thousand sailors, over a quarter of whom were eventually found to be infected (wp, 21 May 2020). The memo drew attention to the reality of the pandemic at a time when Trump was pressing to reopen the country for economic reasons.

As of mid-June 2020, there were no new cases of the novel coronavirus on Guåhan, with the total holding at 185, including 5 deaths, 11 active cases, and 169 released from isolation (pdn, 15 June 2020). By contrast, on 29 June 2020, Johns Hopkins University data showed that the total number of confirmed covid-19 cases in the United States was over 2.6 million and rising—the highest in the world—as contact tracing, testing, and access to personal protective equipment remained limited and politically contentious (jhu, 29 June 2020).

In 2019, mosquito-borne dengue fever returned to the island after seventy-five years; by November, there had been thirteen cases acquired on Guåhan and seven imported cases. In response, the government sprayed schools and homes, cleaned parts of the northern village of Dedediu (Dededo), and held community informational meetings (pdn, 13 Sept 2019).

Guåhan tourism reached new heights in fiscal year 2019, with over 1.63 million visitors for the first time in its history, of which 45 percent were from Korea and 41 percent from Japan—countries that also mostly contained the novel coronavirus when it arose (pdn, 21 Oct 2019). The Guam Visitors Bureau reported that the economic impact was an estimated us$946.5 million, a 52.3 percent increase over the previous year (pdn, 21 Oct 2019). However, the covid-19 pandemic...