Male’, Maldives – Senior Executive Director at the Ministry of Tourism, Ali Razzan revealed that the guesthouses in the atolls in the Male’ region can only serve either locals or tourists at a time.
While speaking at RaajjeTV’s Fala Surukhee programme on Saturday, Razzan informed that according to the current guidelines provided for the guesthouses in the region, the facilities can only serve either locals or tourists at a time.
This means that if the guesthouses start welcoming foreign tourists, they cannot serve locals anymore to ensure the safety of both locals and tourists.
While noting that domestic tourism is an important component of the tourism industry, Razzan stated that the locals will also be given permission to enter the guesthouses as soon as the covid situation improves in the country.
Razzan added that currently, the country is seeing a great improvement in Covid-19 and that the Health Ministry officials along with the Health Protection Agency (HPA) officials are holding daily discussions to ensure that the situation remains the same and improves with time.
While guesthouses in Male’ are given the permission to reopen tomorrow, there are currently over 349 tourist facilities operational and serving guests in the remaining atolls of Maldives.
While the island nation does not require tourist to go through quarantine or testing on arrival, all the tourists are required to complete an online health declaration form given by the country and to also provide a negative PCR test result along with it. The PCR test must be taken at least 96 hours prior to departure.
The International borders of Maldives were reopened on July 15 as an attempt recover from the economic losses the country has faced due to the Covid-19 pandemic. While Maldives welcomed over 27,400 tourists in December so far, the country has recorded over 103,500 tourists arrivals since the border reopening.
The number of confirmed cases has decreasing by a great extent in Maldives as the peak appears to have tipped for the better. The country has been recording two digit cases instead of three digits for over the past months.
In addition to this, the number of recoveries in Maldives has also increased by a great extent. In fact, the recovery rate has increased rapidly from less than 60% to 94% over the past months.
Maldives currently has a total of 13,368 confirmed Covid-19 cases, however, out of these, there are only 607 active cases present in the country. While 12,706 people have completely recovered from the virus in Maldives, 48 people have passed away from Covid-19.
