Visitors wearing protective masks sit on carnival rides at the Sky Ranch amusement park at the SM Pampanga mall in Manila. The number of foreign visitors that visited the Philippines fell 83.97 per cent in 2020 due to travel restrictions imposed to contain the spread of Covid-19, it was announced on Tuesday (Jan 12). - Bloomberg
MANILA, Jan. 12 (Xinhua): The number of foreign visitors that visited the Philippines fell 83.97 per cent in 2020 due to travel restrictions imposed to contain the spread of Covid--19, the Department of Tourism (DOT) said in a report on Tuesday.
The DOT said 1,323,956 foreign visitors entered the country from January to December 2020, or 83.97 per cent lower than the 8,260,913 recorded in the same period in 2019.
The DOT said the total receipts generated from inbound tourism for 2020 registered an estimated 81.40 billion pesos (US$1.69 billion), down 83.12 percent from 482.16 billion pesos (US$10 billion) recorded in the same period in 2019.
Tourism Secretary Bernadette Romulo-Puyat said the impact of Covid-19 that started to be felt in the first quarter of 2020 "was unprecedented and spared no one."
"With the closure of borders to international tourist traffic and the imposition of quarantine measures, tourism activities ground to a halt affecting various enterprises and displacing workers," Puyat said in a statement.
The country's tourism industry has been hit hard by the pandemic. Nearly five million workers either lost their jobs or their salaries slashed, Puyat said.
In 2019, the DOT said the tourism sector employed 5.7 million.
2020 brought enormous challenges to the Philippines. In January last year, the Taal volcano, a famous tourist destination south of Manila, erupted and led to a decline in tourism.
In March last year, Covid-19 forced the government to impose a lockdown that came at a hefty cost to the economy. The disruption of international and domestic travel crippled the tourism industry.
The government slowly eased domestic travel as it began reopening destinations for domestic travel with health and safety protocols in place.
The Philippines, which remains under varying lockdown restrictions, now has 491,258 confirmed Covid19 cases, including 9,554 deaths.
Visitor arrivals in the Philippines slowly climb from a mere 5.36 million in 2015 to 8.26 million in 2019, DOT data showed.
Tourism industries contributed 12.7 percent to the Philippine economy in 2019, the Philippines Statistics Authority said.
in the pandemic front, the Department of Health (DOH) of the Philippines on Tuesday (Jan 12) reported 1,524 new confirmed COVID-19 cases, bringing the total number in the country to 491,258.
The death toll climbed to 9,554 after 139 more patients died from the viral disease, the DOH said, adding that 44 more patients recovered, raising the total number of recoveries to 458,172.
The Philippines, which has about 110 million population, has tested over 6.6 million people since the disease emerged in January last year.
Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said the DOH is observing the spike of cases recorded in recent days, adding that the agency needs another week to conclude if the increase indicates a post-holiday surge.
"We are still monitoring. We are looking at the trend. We want to be very sure. That's why we need another week for us to be able to say if there is increasing in the number of cases," she told an online briefing.
"We have to look at (these numbers) cautiously because there are still intervening factors," she added, citing the return of laboratories to normal operations after the holidays.
World Health Organisation (WHO) Representative in the Philippines Rabindra Abeyasinghe said that a surge is "inevitable" as Filipinos failed to observe physical distancing during the holiday season.
"We've seen over the holiday season that this physical distancing requirement has not been followed. There has been a lot of get-togethers and the massive get-together (such as during a religious event)," he told an online briefing.
"This kind of close contact will give rise to further transmission of the virus or more infection of new people, so it is inevitable that the Philippines is going to see an increase of cases," he said.
He stressed the government needs to identify the infected, ramp up contact tracing "so that the chain of transmission is interrupted."
Abeyasinghe said an "effective response to the surge" is needed to bring this situation rapidly under control.
"It is critically important that the DOH and the local government units put in place mechanisms to initiate early actions so that further transmission can be reduced," he added. - Xinhua
