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Published on : Tuesday, January 5, 2021
Udayanga Weeratunga, the former Sri Lankan Ambassador to Russia, who led the pilot project in reviving Sri Lanka’s tourism sector, said that the government was all set to find out and manage the cases that tested positive for Covid-19 among the group of tourists from Ukraine who came to the island recently.
After carrying on the initial tests, seven people tested positive. Nevertheless, after carrying on additional PCR tests, only five of the 394 foreign tourists who arrived in the country were confirmed to have tested positive for Covid-19 through the newly rolled out project, removing two of the previously confirmed cases.
“We were prepared for this. I was expecting five to eight percent of the tourists to test positive for Covid-19. As a precaution we allocated 25 percent of the hotel rooms to treat the patients and to accommodate the doctors, medical staff and the Army,” Weeratunga said.
Sri Lanka witnessed the first batch of international tourists entering the country after tourism came to a complete idle position due to the virus outbreak early this year. Regardless of the pandemic showing no signs of slowing down whatsovere, Weeratunga, together with the Ministry of Tourism, have come to a decision introduce a pilot project in renewing the sector under the health authorities’ stringent supervision.
On Monday, the first charter flight carrying almost 180 tourists landed at the Mahinda Rajapaksa International Airport. The event was highly appreciated by the tourism shareholders as it was a sign of progress, almost nine months after the Government decided to temporarily call of foreign tourists from entering the country to make easy the repatriation of Sri Lankans employed overseas.
Since August 1st, the country was all geared up to welcome tourists, but had to discard the plans as a result of the sudden rise in the amount of local cases of Covid-19. Health authorities urged to put off recommencing the proposed tourism revival as the sudden raise in Covid-19 patients meant they needed more hospital beds and quarantine centres.
The death toll of Covid-19 victims reached 204 on Thursday, after five people died due to health complications caused by the virus. By Friday, statistics by the Health Promotion Bureau showed that the number of Covid-19 patients detected in the country, including the tourists who came in the charter flights this week, was almost 43,300. The newly arrived tourists had tested positive for the virus in spite of negative testing through PCR tests recommended by the authorities and conducted prior to their arrival in Sri Lanka.