THE case for allocating vaccines in tourism destinations strengthened with the disclosure of the rising number of suicides in Boracay Island, the so-called “crown jewel” of Philippine tourism.
Retired Gen. Melquiades Feliciano, Deputy Chief Implementer for Visayas of the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) said in an online tourism briefing on Monday: “I agree that tourist destinations will be given priority also [in] the vaccination program of the national government…. Last year, Boracay had more suicide deaths than Covid deaths. There were actually 40 suicide deaths compared to one Covid death in Boracay,” as tourism arrivals fell due to the pandemic.
Even after the island was reopened to tourism last September, arrivals plunged again when the National Capital Region was put under enhanced community quarantine in March. In Filipino, Feliciano narrated that in one instance, “A person buying coconuts asked the vendor why there were no more fruits on the coconut trees. And the vendor said, ‘Because the people are hungry, there’s no more food to eat. They only have coconuts to eat.’”
Bohol Gov. Arthur Yap, who hosted the briefer on his province’s “Tourism Prospects in the Context of Current Realities in the War against Tourism,” also appealed to national government officials to send vaccines to Panglao and Dauis, two of Bohol’s key destinations, especially if there is vaccine hesitancy in Metro Manila. “In Bohol, we do not see resistance to vaccination. We have one of the highest vaccination rates in the country, or in the Visayas. Those who don’t want to be vaccinated, why don’t you send the vaccines to Panglao?”
Yap earlier requested Tourism Secretary Bernadette Romulo Puyat for a minimum of 70,000 workers to be vaccinated, or 140,000 doses.
‘No infections from tourists’
For her part, Romulo Puyat appealed to IATF’s Feliciano to help Boracay in implementing better procedures to contain Covid outbreaks, “because their cases are not coming from tourism. They have to solve it also.”
She seemingly expressed her frustration at how the local government units (LGU) of Aklan and Malay were handling the fight versus Covid-19. In Filipino, she wished “all governors are like Gov. Yap, who is strict. Sometimes they just rely everything on us on, it’s like I’m already the Mayor of Malay. Everybody should be helping out—governors, LGUs, the private sector. That’s why I’m happy with Crimson Resort/Filinvest—they donated 5,000 vaccines for Boracay. They earlier donated RT-PCR [test kits].”
She added, she already bought “contact-tracing czar” Baguio Mayor Benjamin Magalong to Boracay in December, who in turn, sent his people “to put up a command center. It would be good to find out what happened to that. Addressing Feliciano, she said, “We, the DOT, even paid for that.”
In a recent letter to Romulo Puyat, Aklan Gov. Florencio Miraflores, and acting Malay Mayor Frolibar Bautista, the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry-Boracay urged government to vaccinate the 40,000 residents on the island, to help it reopen safely to tourism. (See, “Boracay biz group eyes island-wide measures to protect locals, tourists,” in the BusinessMirror, May 17, 2021.)
As of May 22, the municipality of Malay reported only one new confirmed Covid case, with 23 active cases. There were two deaths due to Covid-19 of the total 352 confirmed cases.
As per Malay LGU data, vision arrivals were down to 1,311 in May 1-23, from 11,898 visitors in January 2021, which was already 80-percent lower from the 60,213 domestic tourists in January 2020. There had been a series of surgical lockdowns implemented in some zones and barangays in Boracay due to spots of outbreaks, one of which the municipal health office claimed, was due to an infected tourist from Manila.