LETTER: From river to sea | Opinion

Amid the COVID terror in August 2020, after decades of government mismanagement and corruption, the entire seaport and more than half of the city of Beirut were destroyed in one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history.

More than 200 people died needlessly when a huge cache of chemicals unsafely stored in a Lebanese port exploded. Four years later, many Lebanese remain angry that no one has been held accountable for the disaster and blame the political elite for systemic corruption, government gridlock and the economic crisis.

Mountains of evidence indicate that numerous Lebanese politicians are responsible for murder with probable intent and/or manslaughter under local law. It is almost certain that the actions and inactions of Lebanese government agents created an unreasonable risk to life due to their incompetent management of hazardous conditions at the port of Beirut.

From a global perspective, under international human rights law, a government’s failure to take action to prevent foreseeable risks to life is a violation of the fundamental human right to life.

The same applies to Guam’s politicians and their continued public health failures.

In August 2020, during the horror of COVID, Guam residents were faced with the horrifying discovery that Guam government officials were woefully mismanaging the island’s health care system. After all, local villages have been devastated by more than 400 deaths from the pandemic and thousands of people who have fallen ill and been hospitalized with serious illnesses.

At the start of the COVID outbreak, as the deadly virus escaped from China, Guam became known as one of the hardest-hit American communities, and the U.S. federal government acknowledged the failure of the island’s weak and mismanaged public health system.

While local politicians incompetently attempted to reopen Guam to international tourism in May 2021, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a stark Level 4 warning that all “travelers should avoid all travel to Guam.”

Four years later, many Guamanians remain angry that no one has been held accountable for the COVID-19 pandemic disaster and blame the island’s political elite for systemic corruption, government gridlock and economic abuses.

Amid the horror of COVID in August 2020, the GovGuam Emergency Transportation System received millions of federal dollars to purchase and operate more than 15 ambulances for the civilian population of Guam.

From Yigo to Humotaka and the rivers in between, the 150,000 non-military and non-military civilians living on this island thought they had 10 or at least eight reliable ambulances to help them beat Covid -19 or whatever was trying to kill them.

But the people of Guam were wrong. There were not enough ambulances. And now many people have died.

In fact, at the height of the COVID pandemic in the fall of 2021, more than 62% of patients arriving by ambulance at Guam Memorial Hospital died upon arrival. Simply put, the ambulances arrived too late to save their lives.

There were not 15 serviceable ambulances to serve the 19 beautiful villages of Guam. There weren’t even 10 functional units. No boys and girls, not even as recently as this Halloween, all over 212 square miles of green Guam, from the Pacific Ocean to the Philippine Sea, the non-military people of Guam were lucky to even have four ambulances to race them around the island’s bumpy roads.

Meanwhile, behind the fence of Naval Air Station and Andersen Air Force Base, Guam’s roughly 15,000 fighting men have six serviceable ambulances and perhaps a couple more spares. Guam’s military does not appear to be suffering from the same administrative, logistics, and procurement problems that the Government of Guam appears to have.

I wonder how many troops died on arrival during our latest Covid-19 fiasco?

The Guam Legislature recently held an emergency session to address the critical shortage of ambulances plaguing Guam’s civilian, non-military population. An overwhelming, bipartisan majority of senators, doctors and emergency medical technicians supported legislative efforts to speed up funding and procurement of reliable ambulances in light of the already busy Christmas holiday season fast approaching us.

Wisely, the general consensus among the rational and politically agnostic people in attendance was that Guam was living in dangerous times, and the usual violence and carnage that characterized New Year’s celebrations on the island would likely require more ambulances in Guam’s villages.

The only two people who disagreed were the acting fire chief and Senator Will Parkinson. Apparently, the fire chief believed that Guam needed no more than four or five ambulances right now and that no one was complaining to him about delays in emergency transport times.

The fire chief said the current emergency situation was dire and he would contact everyone if there was a problem.

Senator Will Parkinson took a much darker view. He believed that having four of Guam’s 15 operating ambulances in the past nine months was not an “emergency” but rather a political game, which he accused his colleagues of playing with ulterior motives.

Senator Parkinson said no to helping Guam get more ambulances this Christmas. He said no to GFD and he said no to Guam.

Senator Will Parkinson just earned himself a new nickname: The Grinch.