The Lady, when asked last week if she was playing J'Ouvert next Carnival, confidently answered yes.I'm not so confident.As ashamed as I am to admit it, I am a bit terrified of Ebola. (A bit terrified is about the same as a little pregnant.)
What's not to fear? A disease with fatality rates between 25-90 per cent, and an average of 50 per cent fatality can't be good news for anybody. I know, I know–it's not airborne and so you can't catch it just so. You really have to be up underneath somebody and in contact with their bodily fluids to get infected. But have you ever been in a Carnival fete?
I have.
In a Carnival fete once, many years ago, a complete stranger licked the sweat off my back.I'm not saying this is normal behaviour in a fete, mind you, or that I routinely allow strangers to lick me (anymore). But it is certainly within the range of oddly intimate behaviours that people engage in at a Carnival fete, or on the road at Carnival.
We drink from each other's beer bottles or wineskins. We share cigarettes. We rub our semi-naked bodies against each other. We share forks and spoons while sharing our pelau and corn soup. Women swap lipsticks and mascara. Did I mention we rub our sweaty semi-naked bodies against each other?Carnival and Ebola were made for each other.
My brother is adamant that, because of the way the Ebola virus manifests, nobody in their right mind would go to a fete or to jump up on the road with a sudden fever, muscle pain, headache and sore throat.
As if.
I don't know what Carnival he was going to all these years, but it must not have been a Trini one.I once went J'Ouvert with a badly sprained ankle, hobbling my way around the Savannah to the dulcet strains of Dollar Wine. I'm sure I'm not the only one who endured agony to enjoy Carnival. You'd be surprised at how much pain the body can endure when the mind is determined to wine. Throw some alcohol in that mix and it's a conflagration waiting to happen.
I am pretty sure that if only one person with Ebola numbs their pain with a puncheon before going to fete, it could spell disaster. Jumping up with your gas mask, as Benjai recommends, is not going to help either.
The WHO guidelines on Ebola prevention and control say: "Good outbreak-control relies on applying a package of interventions, namely case management, surveillance and contact tracing, a good laboratory service, safe burials and social mobilisation. Community engagement is key to successfully controlling outbreaks."
Contact tracing? In, say, WASA Fete? Is it even possible? Thousands of people, many of them drunk or high, soaked with sweat and in close physical proximity with each other?
If a case is detected in the weeks leading up to Carnival, forget it. Everybody knows nothing happens in Trinidad just before the national festival. To imagine that the massive mobilisation of the healthcare system required to contain an Ebola outbreak could take place even in the normal course of events in Trinidad is a pipe dream. If you think it's going to happen in the weeks before Carnival, your pipe is probably laced with something stronger than crack.
With vigilance, determination and the right resources (human and material) Ebola outbreak containment is possible, but Carnival would throw the mother of all spanners into that works. I keep thinking about the thousands of people in West Africa who have been infected and affected–and killed–as a result of the current outbreak in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.
When I close my eyes I see health and sanitation workers swathed in protected equipment from head to toe, like the workers in Freetown where the number of new infections was over 600 a week last month. I see them hosing each other down with chlorine solution every time they so much as walk into a house where someone with Ebola had died, like the workers I've seen on documentaries about the virus and the current crisis.
Although we are not Freetown, Carnival presents its own unique challenges.But, hey, if Ebola comes to Trinidad during Carnival I might as well jump up because it might be my last.