Tonga is a tiny island country in the middle of the pacific that lost its main communication channel as the suboceanic cable that connected it with the rest of

Tonga is a tiny island country in the middle of the pacific that lost its main communication channel as the suboceanic cable that connected it with the rest of the world was damaged after the eruption. As it is a tiny country, there are no permanent BBC or CNN offices there with satellite equipment. As it was a volcanic eruption, air travel was severely restricted due to the ash both in the atmosphere as well as in the single airstrip that serves the nation's main island. Help is being dispatched both by The Australian and New Zealand governments (the closest nations to Tonga) by ship. There's also the complication that Tonga was basically spared from COVID, and thus has a population immunologically naive other than from the current vaccines which are not that great against the current dominant variants in circulation, so, there's a great level of care that needs to be taken to ensure that the relief effort doesn't backfire by triggering an outbreak.