‘We will have to vaccinate ourselves from this on Curaçao’

Willemstad

It is eerily quiet on the Handelskade in the old heart of Willemstad. Due to the strict lockdown, shops are closed, people are at home, tourists are away. Sometimes a car passes the man sitting on a wooden bench on the quay. ‘Good job! ‘, a driver shouts through the open window: good job! Others honk or wave.

“I really don’t know who the people are,” says Izzy Gerstenbluth. But they do know who he is: the government epidemiologist on Curaçao, Jaap van Dissel of the Caribbean island. Gerstenbluth (63) and his team have been trying to cope with the covid pandemic for over a year now. Initially that went astonishingly well. But in the meantime the number of infections is exploding.

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