While Cayman Islands Tourism Association president Marc Langevin welcomes the planned roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines in the Cayman Islands, he does not see it as a “silver bullet” for the reopening of local borders.
In fact, the Ritz-Carlton general manager believes banking on one strategy, like a vaccine, “is very dangerous”.
“The vaccine is really, for us, an assurance that in the future the world would be a better place,” Langevin said on the 9 Dec. episode of The Resh Hour.
He says it’s a long-term answer rather than a short-term remedy. His comments came hours before Premier Alden McLaughlin provided an update on government’s vaccine plans. “I think the vaccine should be incorporated into our layered protocol.
There were different numbers announced from the point of view of how many vaccines are going to be available, who is going to be [getting it] and how long it’s going to be [available],” Langevin said.
Premier McLaughlin has said Cayman’s reopening plans “are contingent on a successful vaccine programme locally and internationally.”
The CITA president said, as it stands, it is not easy for him to judge the impact of the vaccines as, “I don’t think that’s going to lead to any opening by Easter or summertime.”
Langevin said those in the tourism industry are anxious to hear what government’s vision for Cayman’s reopening will be and what its next phases will look like. Without that information, he said there is no way anyone can plan for their businesses or their staff.
“I don’t think that [vaccines] is the one silver bullet that’s going to lead us to a return to tourism. For the long term, that’s the right thing. I’m hoping that a vaccine by the fall or by next year will allow us to be in a position where we can go back and say, ‘Alright, now we can travel, customers can travelers and we can relax,’” he said.
Cayman, he suggested, should look at a multi-layered approach to reopening, as is being done in other countries. He said the approach could include vaccinations for tourism workers, a tracking app for visitors and changes to local COVID-19 protocols to require pretesting and reducing in quarantine times.
“I think there are a lot of ideas that as a private sector, as a hospitality industry… tourism industry, we can bring to the table. We can add to the conversation because obviously we have means, we have cooperation that help us to develop protocols and ideas. That’s what was successful when at the beginning of the lockdown when we reopened, we came as a group between restaurant and hotel and presented protocols for sanitation,” he said.
Langevin said he is going to take the vaccine once available, so it is not a question of fear.
However, he said that are a number of factors still to be considered. “The issue with the vaccination for visitors is, assuming that they are giving… [the] vaccine to first anybody that worked in the medical field and the people most at risk or the aging population, that is not necessarily the population that is coming on the island,” he explained.
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The question is how badly do you want tourism in the future? Other island destinations are already open with the requirement of a negative test within 72 hours of arrival. Waiting on full vaccination may take a year plus – allowing other places to capture the tourists. That may not matter to some but keep in mind the financial services industry may not be as strong going forward and tourism done right could be a significant revenue generator.
We should be working harder to reduce our dependence on tourism as an economic generator. That should be the priority for the Cayman Islands. The less we rely on tourism the better off we will be in the future. It would be shortsighted to assume that once we are past COVID that there will not be many other disrupters to world travel in the future. The lesson we need to learn from COVID are that an economy that relies too much in tourism is an economy that is a always at risk to being disrupted.
Again Mr. Langevin touts pre arrival testing and shortened quarantine periods. Neither of these strategies will keep our community safe in any meaningful way. Tracking apps for visitors will be useless as they can easily be manipulated by the user, and again will provide little protection to our community. All the recent breaches of the quarantine protocols are proof that you cannot rely on visitors to act in good faith.
Please Cayman you need a plan for travelers from the US that have vaccinations. We haven’t been to our home in Cayman since February and we are hopeful for a vaccine in February- once fully vaccinated we would expect to be able to travel without quarantine for 14 days!
I just ask….what happens when the virus morphs (I believe it has already) and the existing vaccine does not work….? No one stops visitors during flu season when many, many people end up dying worldwide. Many of us never get flu shots and we do just fine. Why don’t you test prior to flying, once we land, and THEN and ONLY THEN quarantine the people who test positive.
There has to be a better way of dealing with all of this other than shutting down. I’m not convinced the damage is any greater with the shut down than with the virus. People are dying to some extent either way……?
Let common sense prevail! Let’s get back to living so people have jobs, developers have projects, stores have customers, restaurants get to serve us, etc.