By Earl Bousquet
Since March 2020 when the 21st Century’s worst global pandemic was declared, the COVID-19 experiences of Australia, China, Cuba, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam and several other countries proved to the Caribbean and other developing countries worldwide that early action saves lives and delays result in high casualty rates, including deaths.
The original virus has also since bred SARS-CoV-2 and later quickly mutated, creating new variants from South Africa, UK, Brazil, US and India, yielding some firm conclusions, among them that the tourism and travel industry provided (and still do) the main vehicles – airlines and ships, buses and trains – that transport (ed) the virus across all borders worldwide.
American air and cruise lines were ordered to ground and dock planes and ships as the global tourism industry was brought to a halt. But the calmness of the air and oceans yielded positive results, from the reduction of the regional and global carbon footprint to the recovery of marine species in places where cruise lines ‘threatened’ them for decades.
For instance, it took COVID’s absence of ships and crowds for one year, for Venetians to actually see dolphins, turtles and birds return to their calm waters; and the recent docking of the first cruise ship to return was met with protests.
The $90 billion US cruise industry is naturally anxious to get sailing again and cruise lines with ships in Caribbean waters were able to get some Caribbean governments to agree to accommodate a series of hurried (some say dangerously premature) week-long cruises between islands, two of which (cruises) have had to be called off within a fortnight of each other after passengers earlier cleared to travel tested positive for COVID.
The cancellations also led to contact tracing among the hundreds of passengers and the entire 1,500 crew quarantined for 14 days.
But, be all that as it may, a third trip, with the same ‘Celebrity Millennium’ at Port Castries (Tuesday, June 29), ahead of which tourism-related protocols were either reduced, rearranged and simulated to facilitate taxis and tour operators taking passengers directly to selected locations island-wide, new social distancing protocols effectively bypassing roadside vendors who traditionally depend on direct sales and interaction with visitors.
The global experience is that while tourism-dependent economies cannot simply close the industry down, very tough decisions have to be taken to protect and save it, especially regarding safety and security at ports of entry.
Australia and New Zealand, France and Germany, the UK, USA, and Canada all closed their borders to the most people from red-listed countries, London imposing strict entry requirements on everyone from every European Union (EU) capital, except Gibraltar and Iceland.
Countries depending on tourism and large volumes of air traffic are effectively guarding their borders and making entry requirements more difficult, not to keep visitors out but to protect local populations. But some Caribbean islands have repeatedly shown the risky propensity to always readily reduce and relax protocols, even burst travel bubbles, to compete and attract more visitors.
International airlines are just as guilty of encouraging hasty returns to Caribbean skies, but the cruise lines have traditionally pushed harder to get more, in the process always being ready – once the host countries’ governments agree.
Indeed, Saint Lucia’s prime minister and tourism minister have both made hardly-masked references to a seemingly impending related deal with an unnamed cruise line, hopefully before elections. No such agreement has been announced, but its mechanisms may very well already be in effect while the said cruise line opts to watch how the election winds blow.
So, given the previous experiences of two such cruises being called off in quick succession due to the virus being found among passengers, earlier medically cleared to sail, to what extent is Saint Lucia’s ports of call for cruise lines, sufficiently ready to welcome visitors with confidence that none has the single virus it will take to spark the next wave on any Caribbean shore?
In Saint Lucia’s case, since visitors medically cleared will not have to quarantine, it equally applies that Saint Lucians returning home – including the incalculable numbers in the diaspora virtually dying to vote.
Electoral arrangements to be policed under a strict COVID Emergency are being arranged and given the propensity of some parties to invite and/or arrange ‘free tickets’ for supporters to return home for or on election day and given the risks to life involved, I would agree with a proposition that arrangements be made in this unprecedented national general election to facilitate what a retired electoral officer described as ‘Overseas Voting by Zoom, but Under International Supervision.’
In the meantime, never mind the endless horrors and deep blues that have come with COVID, it’s once again exposed the naked underbelly of the inadequacy of our economic systems, social structures and national institutions and their incapacity to respond quick enough in times of crisis.
Fifteen months is quite a long time in politics, far less an emergency – and it’s unbelievable that we’re still talking about returning ‘Back to Normal’ when brand-new 21st Century thinking is most necessary, especially regarding new and old ways and means to rebuild the economy on new pillars less dependent on virtual bricks and mortar from abroad, to eliminate our continuing overwhelming dependence on food from outside; and to seek new terms of global trade with new and old partners with similar experiences.
Election campaigning is in full swing on the ground and online, off-the-cuff and below-the-belt in Saint Lucia, the boasts again emerging about the government having ‘handled COVID better’ than others – and ruling party supporters being invited to measure how good their government has done by ‘imagining’ what it would have been like ‘if the USA or the UK had the same size and population’ as Saint Lucia.
The new sophistry of arguments for election and re-election, continuity or another fresh start, can sometimes be mind-boggling. But given what’s at stake for many of the experienced candidates seeking election or re-election, the 2021 general elections campaign will continue to predictably see and hear the unprecedented like never before.
As with all of Saint Lucia’s nine elections since Independence in 1979, it again boils down to the two main parties appealing to their near-equal bases; the ruling party’s candidates putting aside all claimed worries about the election date to ‘Follow de Leader’, just as the majority of opposition supporters insist ‘It’s PJP time now.’
In the circumstances, while COVID will continue to be a dominant elections campaign topic, the UWP and SLP will continue to harness their bases with the fervent hope that Independents and third parties don’t attract enough support to become ‘spoilers’ or ‘determinants’ in a poll too-close for traditional election comfort.
Meanwhile, with its COVID Report Card not the envy of any other Caribbean nation, Saint Lucia will need more than prayers to keep the more-invisible and 15-times-more-transmissible ‘Delta’ variant out, especially if the entry bar is lowered at Port Castries on Tuesday, or the return of ferry services and inter-island flights are not appropriately monitored.
No Saint Lucian can wish bad for Helen’s Sons and Daughters, but everything we’ve seen and heard in the last 15 months should remind us all that we should always hope for the best, but also plan for the worst.
It’s always proven to be good planning – and should be elementary.
