COVID-19 pandemic in Easter Island

On 12 January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed that a novel coronavirus was the cause of a respiratory illness in a cluster of people in Wuhan, Hubei, China, which was reported to the WHO on 31 December 2019.

[citation needed] On 24 April, confusion arose at Santiago International Airport regarding positive results for COVID-19 on tests conducted on natives waiting to return to Easter Island.

A group of 20 persons of people who had tested positive at the airport or had close contact with them decided to stay in Santiago for a voluntary quarantine of 14 days, amidst fears that their immediate return to the island would result in discrimination, while the remainder of the 527 passengers had departed as planned.

[13] In early October, a group of 25 natives of Rapa Nui was finally able to return to their island after being stuck on Tahiti for six months.

The returnees will be placed in a 14-day quarantine, and the plane is expected to carry back a second group composed of 15 Tahitians who had been stranded on Easter Island.

The 52nd installment of the annual culture festival will also be cut short and last one a single week instead of the usual two, after plans to scrap it completely were vetoed by the community.

The local government and some hotels provided free stay and food for those who had run out of money, and eventually the visitors were evacuated to mainland Chile via chartered flights.

But now many on the island – whose economy depends heavily on tourism – feared that they won't see the return of sufficient numbers of tourists anytime soon.

[20] To combat the crisis, native islanders have turned to the ancestral Polynesian tradition of Tapu (from which the English word taboo is derived), which resulted in a cultural acceptance of the lockdown and the self-isolation of affected families.