The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

Biden’s first move to combat COVID-19 and its newest strains became controversial for the Bahamas, as all travelers globally will now have to undergo mandatory 14-day quarantine upon arrival and the Ministry of Tourism fears that it will discourage travelers and prolong the economic downturn locally.

When Bahamasair and the tourism officials announced of expanding markets on the news a few days ago, I was hoping that they would change their travel destinations to avoid catching the new COVID strains in the US. Unfortunately; they still kept insisting on new destinations to infested US cities, only now it is Nashville and the state of Connecticut. Worse, D’Aguilar had to complain to the Biden Administration to ease restrictions but this has created an embarrassing display of the lack of professionalism shown in diplomatic affairs.

Asia is on track to become one of the first regions to have successfully suppressed COVID-19 in most of their nations while we’re twisting in the wind, trying to beg to Washington, DC, to ease up the new travel restrictions on the Bahamas. The West is virtually deadlocked with vaccines in scarce supply, lockdowns became ineffective because of rampant disobedient citizens and new strains on the loose.

However, the main focus on this matter is Bahamasair’s new destination markets. For starters, Nashville, Cleveland, the state of Massachusetts and the state of Connecticut don’t really count as new markets. It’s the same middle class Americans with two different cities. Plus, the new national restrictions are still in place so it won’t do much good as long as the spread of the virus remains uncontrollable. Secondly, the US has the original strain, and the new ones from South Africa, Britain and Brazil. If Florida has one of the most cases for one of the new strains, then we should start to really reconsider our post-COVID strategy for tourism. Then Bahamasair is talking about opening the Latin American markets when they’re also unstable?

This new marketing is setting up to fail us again like July last year. If the Bahamas wants to suppress the spread of COVID and save the economy, then the Ministry of Tourism and Bahamasair will have to be realistic. The US, Latin America and Europe will have to be put off for tourist arrivals for now. The way is to unlock new markets is for East Asia, the UAE and some parts of Africa in order to preserve our economy while keeping COVID numbers down as it will allow their airlines to come here. No one can stress this matter enough; because when we look at America, Mexico and Brazil, that will set the example on a botched pandemic response.

Not only did the citizens refuse to follow laws, the politicians from those countries have also horribly failed because they politicised the tragedy and they sat there and allowed it to spread so that it would hurt political rivals instead of doing the right thing and it caused further complications with the vaccines in the market. Our current government administration are usually watching the news at their homes and at work and they can clearly see the disastrous result of total malfeasance in the US, but instead of dealing with proper countries with an effective pandemic response plan, we reopened last year and greatly damaged our economy.

In short, the only sane option left at the table is to launch negotiations with the East Asian markets and any country out there that has the virus effectively suppressed. The US can’t help us at this point, Canada is closed, Britain and Europe are stuck in a rut and we’re economically sinking. This is a risk to completely change our entire market, but it’s better than waiting until the Bahamas capsizes as our Northern neighbour is crippled.

AMMAKA RUSSELL

Nassau,

February 4, 2021.