Travel advisory against Antigua not the full picture

Hours before the United States slapped Antigua and Barbuda with an advisory that warned Americans not to visit the island due to widespread COVID-19 infections, a regional tourism body says such warnings do not tell the full picture.

In a statement issued Tuesday, the Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Association (CHTA) said while travel advisories have been placed on several Caribbean destinations due to the increase in COVID-19 cases, attributed to the highly contagious delta variant, the region is still safe because of effective health safety measures and a continued commitment to protect employees and visitors.

Vanessa Ledesma, Acting CEO and Director General of the CHTA, contended that the evidence does not suggest that increased travel to the region over the past several months contributed to any significant spread of OCVID-19.

The CHTA CEO argued that travel warnings based on COVID-19 positivity levels can be misleading.

“We have gone to great lengths to produce the safest possible corridors in our tourism-related communities,” she stressed, adding that “Caribbean travel is safe and continues to get safer.”

The CHTA official lauded regional countries, noting that contact tracing analysis provided by several countries that are monitoring this, showed the level of COVID-19 transmission between residents and visitors was “negligible”.

Moreover, Ledesma said testing of traveller departing to major source markets had shown insignificant positivity rates. Ledesma insisted that the Caribbean was commited to health safety which started long before the beginning of the pandemic.

Early in 2020, CHTA has worked with Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA), the Caribbean Tourism Organisation (CTO), the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) and the Global Tourism Resiliency and Crisis Management Centre (GTRCMC)
to form the COVID-19 Caribbean Tourism Task Force.

The CHTA statement added: “There is no question that the rate of vaccination within the tourism and related communities is higher than the national averages, and we know that vaccination provides that extra level of protection for our team members and their families. (IMC1)