• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Caribbean tourism recovery punctured by new coronavirus spike

September 3, 2021 by David Barret Leave a Comment

September 3, 2021

By Kate Chappell

KINGSTON (Reuters) – Just as tourism was beginning to show signs of recovery, the Caribbean has been hit by a new wave of coronavirus infections that is causing lockdowns and flight cancellations and overwhelming hospitals.

Countries including Jamaica, Martinique, The Bahamas, Barbados, St. Lucia, and Dominica have seen a rise in cases fueled by the highly contagious Delta variant and a relaxation of earlier restrictions. Misinformation spread on social media has also contributed to a low vaccine uptake.

The Caribbean is one of the regions most dependent on tourism, with nine countries in the world’s top 20, according to an index compiled by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

Many experienced double-digit declines in gross domestic product (GDP) growth when COVID-19 struck, drying up tourism dollars, destroying jobs and hurting their balance of payments.

Since the latest wave of COVID-19 hit Dominica and the government ordered a lockdown – now lifted – business has been slow for Nahgie Laflouf, operations manager for adventure company Extreme Dominica on the island of some 70,000 people.

“Things are gone back a bit quiet,” said Laflouf, who takes tourists hiking and rafting among Dominica’s lush forests and waterfalls. “They had started to pick up before the spike.”

In August, there were four or five tours, when they might have had three times that before the COVID jump, Laflouf said.

The outbreak has prompted governments to impose restrictions including curfews and mandatory vaccinations as they deal with too few hospital beds, low levels of oxygen and exhausted healthcare workers.

Some countries, like the Cayman Islands, shut their borders to tourists, but others like Jamaica continued to welcome them, allowing the country of 3 million people to salvage some earnings.

“We have to double up our efforts to manage,” Jamaican Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett told Reuters. “The region is now on alert to deal with visitor hesitancy.”

Jamaica’s foreign exchange earnings from tourism fell $2.5 billion last year, a 74% drop from 2019, the government says.

The IDB said vaccines are crucial to getting tourism back to normal and forecast that recovery to pre-pandemic levels of economic activity could take up until 2024 in some countries.

Vaccine rollout in the Caribbean has been slow due to vaccine skepticism, logistical hold-ups and inadequate supply.

Jamaica has administered enough doses to give two shots to about 9% of the population, data compiled by Reuters show. Since the start of July, new COVID-19 cases more than tripled and now stand above 69,000, while hospitalizations have risen almost sevenfold.

Total cases in The Bahamas have jumped by almost half since the beginning of July. Active cases in Dominica skyrocketed from five on July 7 to 638 on Aug. 27.

In Martinique, the French government announced a three-week lockdown on Aug. 10 and asked tourists to leave the country.

“Most of the shops are closed down, most of them have to put people on layoff,” 41-year-old Cristal Joseph said by phone from the town of Le Lamentin, Martinique.

In St. Lucia, infections are up eighteen-fold to over 1,900 since July 9, the Pan-American Health Organization said.

Concerns that St. Lucia could end up on Britain’s COVID-19 ‘red list’ – which imposes an expensive quarantine on Britons returning from such nations – are hurting tourism, said Norbert Williams, a spokesman for the opposition United Workers Party.

“There have been a number of cancellations going into the Christmas season,” said Williams.

(Reporting by Kate Chappell; Editing by Dave Graham and Rosalba O’Brien)

Source Link Caribbean tourism recovery punctured by new coronavirus spike

David Barret
David Barret

Related posts:

  1. Britain’s Raab, in Qatar, says need to engage with Taliban on Afghanistan
  2. Facemasks and sanitizer as French kids go back to school
  3. Spain’s Fallas fiesta resumes after COVID hiatus, rain damage
  4. Virgin Galactic to launch first commercial research mission

Filed Under: News

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

  • Mine Spiders Bigger Than A Burger Patty Lurk Deep In Abandoned Caves
  • Blackout Zones: The Places On Earth Where Magnetic Compasses Don’t Work
  • What Is Actually Happening When You Get Blackout Drunk? An Ethically Dubious Experiment Found Out
  • Koalas Get A Shot At Survival As World-First Chlamydia Vaccine Gets Approval
  • We Could See A Black Hole Explode Within 10 Years – Unlocking The Secrets Of The Universe
  • Denisovan DNA May Make Some People Resistant To Malaria
  • Beware The Kellas Cat? This “Cryptid” Turned Out To Be Real, But It Wasn’t What People Thought
  • “They Simply Have A Taste For The Hedonists Among Us”: Festival Mosquito Study Has Some Bad News
  • What Is The Purpose Of Those Lines On Your Towels?
  • The Invisible World Around Us: How Can We Capture And Clean The Air We Breathe?
  • 85-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Eggs Dated Using “Atomic Clock For Fossils” For The First Time
  • Why Shouldn’t You Kiss Babies? New Study Shows Even Healthy Newborns Can Become Severely Ill With RSV
  • Earth Has A New Quasi-Moon – And It Has Probably Been Around For Decades
  • Want To Kill Your Prey? Do It Feather-Legged Lace Weaver Spider Style And Vomit All Over Them
  • IFLScience The Big Questions: Are We In The Anthropocene?
  • The Wildfire Paradox Affecting 440 Million People Has As Worrying A Solution As You’d Expect
  • AI May Infringe On Your Rights And Insult Your Dignity (Unless We Do Something Soon)
  • How Do You Study Cryptic Species? We’re Finally Lifting The Lid On The World’s Least Understood Mammals
  • Once-In-A-Decade Close Encounter With Hazardous Asteroid 2025 FA22 Approaches
  • With 229 Pairs, This Beautiful Animal Has The Highest Number Of Chromosomes Of Any Animal
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version