A senior lawmaker has called on local executives to support the national government’s efforts to quickly return the country to normalcy by ditching whatever entry restrictions on inbound travelers they might still have in place in their respective localities to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
Camarines Sur Rep. LRay Villafuerte said keeping the strict restrictions on the entry of travelers or tourists up to now defeats the purpose of Executive Order No. 7, which President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. had issued to further relax anti-Covid health and travel protocols nationwide as part of accelerated government efforts to fully open the economy.
“EO 7 will be rendered useless if international travelers or tourists would finally be enticed anew to go to the Philippines, only to end up being saddled, upon their arrival in the national capital or elsewhere, with troublesome entry requirements in the local places they want to visit. How can Malacañan Palace and the DOT [Department of Tourism] convincingly tell the rest of the world that the Philippines is truly open for business and for tourists if the burdensome travel protocols that were put up as part of the anti-Covid lockdowns or mobility restrictions are still in place?” he said.
A former CamSur governor, Villafuerte made this call as he backed the appeal of Tourism Secretary Christina Garcia-Frasco on local officials, through the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG), to lift entry restrictions on travelers that they had enforced in their respective local government units (LGUs) since the pandemic broke out in 2020.
Villafuerte, also president of the National Unity Party (NUP), said “it is nice to know that we are starting to see a turnaround in our tourism business, with the number of arrivals hitting 1.9 million at the start of November, or higher than this year’s official target of 1.7 million and 2021’s total arrivals of 1.4 million.”
“But there is really no room for complacency here, when one considers that our regional rivals, like Thailand, for instance, already had 7 million tourists as of October, and expects its visitor arrivals to reach a total of 10 million by end-December,” he said.
“We certainly have no way of catching up, much less overtake our Asean competitors for tourists when we continue to have barriers like cumbersome local-travel requirements that naturally turn off prospective visitors,” Villafuerte added.
Citing a report by the independent OCTA Research Group, Villafuerte said the Covid-19 positivity rate in the National Capital Region (NCR) was down to 7.5 percent early this week from the week-ago’s 8.12 percent, or the lowest in the region since the 14.6 percent rate in July.
The positivity rate is the percentage of people found Covid-positive from among the total number of individuals tested for the coronavirus at a given time.
For Villafuerte, the lifting of entry curbs for overseas and local travelers in all areas of the country would be the best way to carry out President Marcos’s view that the government should start treating Covid-19 not as an emergency but as something that has to be managed in the long term like flu and pneumonia.
“Our quick and strong rebound from the nearly three-year pandemic, which is contingent in part on the full recovery of our tourism sector—to be driven by a dramatic increase in tourist arrivals, will probably remain elusive for so long as the Philippines is stuck on the list of countries with tough entry restrictions for travelers,” Villafuerte said.
Although the World Health Organization asserted last month that the pandemic remains to be a “public health emergency of international concern” and still with “many risks and uncertainties,” Villafuerte pointed out that the increased relaxation of anti-Covid health protocols supports President Marcos’s view that Filipinos should learn to live with the virus as part of the new normal.
Image credits: Facebook.com/lrayvillafuerteofficial