By EARYEL BOWLEG

Tribune Staff Reporter

ebowleg@tribunemedia.net

TOURISM Minister Dionisio D’Aguilar said he thinks allowing fully vaccinated travellers to The Bahamas without a negative COVID-19 RT-PCR test will make the country a more attractive destination for visitors.

Prime Minister Dr Hubert Minnis announced that this vaccination perk will come into effect on May 1. He also said fully vaccinated travellers within the country also will be exempt from test requirements when travelling to and from New Providence, Grand Bahama, Abaco, Exuma and Eleuthera.

This comes after the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) increased The Bahamas’ health notice from level three to level four, citing a very high level of COVID-19 in the country. Consequently, the health agency advised travellers to avoid all travel to The Bahamas.

Mr D’Aguilar said he believes the vaccination incentive will make the country more attractive and that will counter the US level four advisory.

“Remember now, almost every country in the world is in level four,” he said. “I think it’s 80 percent—all large proportion of persons—and you know the country that is not in level four and clearly they’re not going to put it in level four, is the United States.

“I mean they’re far worse than we are, so if you are travelling from the United States to The Bahamas and you’re looking at their level of COVID compared to our level of COVID, our country is way safer than theirs and 93 percent of our foreign visitors come from presently... from the United States.”

While some observers think removing the test requirement is unwise, the minister pointed to the advantages of the vaccine reducing the chances of spreading the virus and being hospitalised.

“The science is showing that when you get vaccinated you have a 100 percent chance that you will not get so sick that you have to end up in a hospital –  that’s the first advantage,” he told reporters yesterday.

“The second advantage is that you reduce by 80 to 90 percent your ability, if infected, to spread it on to somebody else. So the benefits of getting vaccinated are huge. You don’t get sick and you reduce substantially your ability to spread the virus to other persons.

“... Now that is what the science is showing and that’s why the CDC is saying once you get vaccinated you’re fairly free to travel and that we are piggy backing off that science, that getting vaccinated gives you substantial benefits as it relates to travel.”

He added the test removal for vaccinated individuals will help improve tourism numbers.

“Right now we have a regime in place where you have to get a PCR test five days prior to arrival in The Bahamas. You have to pay for and go online and get a visa. What we’re finding is the PCR test five days prior to arrival is causing a lot of stress. What is happening is that persons go and get the test, they have to wait for the results.

“They have to upload onto the site. They have to wait for us to respond to them and all of this is causing a lot of consternation to travel and we feel that once you get the vaccine the need to go through all of this bureaucracy, for a lack of a better word, in order to enter the country will make The Bahamas an attractive destination while at the same time maintaining what we feel is a safe environment for persons to come into the country.

“We feel that you know certainly the removal of the PCR test and the acceptance of the vaccine will help us in our climb back to what we used to be at. Now it’s probably going to take quite some time for us to get there. If I had a crystal ball I would say 12-24 months for us to return back to the 2019 levels…..we’re only back to about 25-30 percent of what we used to have. So we still got a long way to go.”

He said forward bookings are looking “far more robust than they have been,” but “it’s all relative”.

With a 2019 record of 7.2 million tourists, he said the country is still “substantially down off that number” but slowly starting to trend upwards.

“. . .I’ve spoken to a number of the hotels and they are saying that they’re encouraged by their summer bookings and so you know I’m encouraged that the comeback is coming.”

Asked if this is one step closer to making it mandatory for travellers to The Bahamas to be vaccinated, the minister answered the government is not going to make that decision yet and made it clear the government is not forcing anybody to take the vaccine.

He said: “When we were younger, we were required to get the mumps and rubella (MMR), smallpox vaccination and everybody had their vaccination cards. Is a vaccination against us one day going to fall into that category – I don’t know.

“... I mean all of our kids have these little vaccination cards. Certainly we want to protect our population, but we’re not at that time yet.

“What private companies decide to do, they will obviously be guided by the law and they will be guided by what their policies are.”