Anguilla’s borders have been closed to visitor traffic since mid-March 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Hotels and villas have had to close, and staff have been let go. The island economy has collapsed. Both employers and employees are close to the limit of what they can bear. Government revenue has shrunk to half the budgeted amount. Public expenses, meanwhile, have more than doubled.
Some of the villa owners are pressuring government to begin opening Anguilla up to tourist arrivals. In a memo of 23 July from the Anguilla Hotel and Tourism Association to its members, there is a suggestion that villa owners and their guests be allowed in by private jet or charter from 1 August. This is to be a soft opening preliminary to a full opening of the tourism plant this coming winter.
I have some thoughts on the suggestion that we now pull the plug on the measures that have kept us safe.
Covid-19 continues to rage throughout the world, including both the USA, our main catchment area, and Antigua, Puerto Rico and St Maarten, the hubs through which our airline passengers arrive. The USA has the worst statistics for the disease in the entire world.
Canada and other countries that depend on tourism are not permitting anyone from the USA to enter their countries. The USA is Europe’s biggest tourism market. The Europeans have banned US tourists even as they open to other visitors.
Anguilla’s main defence against widespread sickness, hospitalisation and death, is the availability of a safe and effective vaccine. The likelihood is that there will not be such a vaccine this year. The earliest would be eighteen months from the date the research institutes began to work on vaccines, ie, January 2020. If so, this means that we cannot realistically expect to have a vaccine for Covid-19 before July 2021. It follows that the earliest we should be considering reopening Anguilla’s borders to tourist arrivals is winter 2021. Anything before that will almost inevitably result in our being re-infected and having to close our ports and our hotels again.
Under President Trump’s misguided leadership over the past six months, the virus has been allowed to rampage through the USA. Why would Anguilla let any US resident in before mid-2021 when they are so evidently careless about their health? What do they care about our health if they care so little about their own? It would be different if we were to allow in tourists from countries where they had suppressed the Covid-19 epidemic. But, to allow into Anguilla visitors from the USA currently is unimaginable to me.
If we do open our ports for guests of villa owners, will we be able to make them take the necessary health precautions? Will visitors be made to produce a Covid test result that is not more than three days old showing they are clear, or be sent back on the plane they arrived on? If they turn out later to be infected, will we be able to make them self-quarantine for 14 days? Do we have the means or the will to police a quarantine? These are rich and “entitled” people who are accustomed to buying their way out of any situation.
If any of them later turns up positive, we shall have to trace all their contacts and confine them to quarantine if we are to stop social spread of the virus. Do we have adequate amounts of testing equipment? Do we have the capability to produce timely results? Are our health personnel trained in contact tracing? Do we have the resources to conduct a proper tracing programme, and to enforce the resulting quarantines?
What about our stocks of Personal Protective Equipment? Will our supplies of masks be adequate before the borders are opened? Do we have the gowns and other PPE needed for the medical staff? Do we have the latest models of ventilators for when we are committed to the Intensive Care Unit? Do all the villas have adequate stocks of PPE in advance of opening for the use of staff and guests in appropriate circumstances? Will our villa staff be trained in the correct use of this PPE prior to opening?
If we admit in visitors from the USA, and as is inevitable, the virus catches and begins to spread in Anguilla, we shall be obliged to lock the island down again for a couple more months at least, until it is contained.
Of course, repatriation of Anguillian nationals from any country remains a continuing necessity. Fortunately, the testing and quarantine protocols and safeguards put in place by the Health Department for dealing with repatriated Anguillians are now well practised. Such repatriations have not resulted in any local spread of the virus since the first three cases in March.
It is arguable that the last administration suffered politically, and lost the June general election, at least partly because they chose health over economic interests. They totally closed the island to visitors in March. Our borders are still closed today. The result was they limited Covid-19 cases in Anguilla to three mild ones in March. We are free of infection today. But the previous administration suffered serious political damage. Many businesses closed, some permanently, and large numbers of us became unemployed. Schools closed, and the children struggled with distance learning.
Opening our borders to visitors from a country where the infection is surging out of control will likely destroy all that our sacrifice has accomplished. Is the present government prepared for the political backlash that will follow if they allow the virus back in to flourish for the sake of a few villa owners’ financial interests?
If we open the island to US visitors, we can expect numbers of us, not only to be committed to the ICU, but to die. What answer will the administration give our families when they are accused of opening before the USA could flatten its own curve? Are they ready to deal with the accusation that they allowed the villa owners to kill us off?
Other than for a short period in August, July to November are dead months for tourism in Anguilla. It is the Hurricane season. This is the low season for West Indian tourism. Why open the island in this quiet period when there will be few or no tourists (other than the highly risky ones from the USA) coming by air or by sea to Anguilla? Opening our borders to tourists of any kind now will contribute hardly a penny to either government revenue or to the economy. There is no real economic point in reopening before late November or early December.
Are the Anguillian public prepared to deal with a new surge? We have been safe for so long that we now all ignore the social distancing rules we used to practise in March. People lean on shop counters, despite the printed signs; stand in line in the supermarket pressed up against each other, despite the spacing marks on the floor; and not one of us wears a mask in public. When we let in tourists, we will need to relearn the social distancing precautions. Will our health authorities engage us citizens in an intense social distancing revision course in the months before we let in tourists?
Finally, as Dr Fauci reminds us, we must ask what is the recommendation of the Health Authority? What is the expert advice our Ministry of Tourism has received? Is the recommendation that it is safe to let in visitors to villas from the USA? Or should we wait until after a safe and effective vaccine is generally available?
Later on Friday, I was pleased to see what amounted to a Government response to the AHTA initiative on behalf of villa owners. This was a press release titled “Covid 19 Update 13”. It advised that Anguilla’s borders will remain closed until 31 October. An exception is made for visitors from countries with active cases of less than 0.2% of the population, who will be allowed into Anguilla on condition. They must comply with all relevant protocols and quarantine regulations. That rules out visitors from the USA. The US (with 4% of the world’s population and 25% of all Covid-19 infections) cannot meet the less than 0.2% benchmark. We all anxiously await the arrival of a safe and effective vaccine. I need not have worried. No doubt, it helped that we have a physician as Premier.
24 July 2020
Revised 27 July
