The lack of political will in CARICOM to agree to common COVID-19 protocol standards is perhaps the biggest failure of this pandemic, said Edmund Bartlett, Jamaica’s Minister of Tourism.
Bartlett was responding to the placing of several CARICOM and other Caribbean countries under the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) Level 4 COVID-19 High-Level risk assessment.
Under this assessment, the CDC advises that travellers should avoid all travel to the destinations listed.
The CARICOM countries placed under Level 4 are Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Cuba, Guyana, Haiti, Belize, Suriname, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Turks and Caicos. Other Caribbean countries on the list are Curacao, Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, Sint Maarten, St Eustatius, Saba, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands.
Antigua and Barbuda has since been re-evaluated.
“I think that while countries have a responsibility to citizens to review from time to time the status of countries that they interact with, the absence of any standardisation that enables us to measure effectively where we all stand is a concern because it leads to arbitrariness sometimes and a level of confusion globally as to how travel and tourism should be effected,” Bartlett told Loop News.
Bartlett was not too worried about any fallout from the advisory, however, stating that Jamaica has had designations of this type before and it doesn’t significantly affect the visitor flow.
“Jamaica as a destination is well known, we have managed the protocols extremely well and established some innovations that are enviable in the world such as the resilient corridor. We have established Jamaica Cares, an end-to-end health security programme which will protect visitors who come and removes the burden of managing the pandemic from the taxpayers of the country,” he said.
