SYDNEY: Australia is likely to remain shut to visitors till late 2022, the nation’s trade and tourism minister stated on Friday (May 7), as another global COVID-19 surge smashed hopes of a quick reopening.
Minister Dan Tehan stated that a wave of cases on the Indian subcontinent confirmed that Australia’s near blanket ban on arrivals was still important to keep the nation’s coronavirus-free.
Since Mar 20, 2020, Australians have been barred from traveling abroad, and a hard-to-get individual exemption is required for overseas visitors to enter the nation.
It’s “very hard to find out” when borders could reopen, Tehan, informed Sky News, “the best guess can be in the middle to the second half of next yr”.
Earlier than the pandemic, about 1 million short-term visitors entered the nation every month. That figure is now around 7,000.
Anyone who does enter must undergo 14 days of strict hotel quarantine.
A recently established travel bubble with New Zealand has had mixed success, being paused for cities where the virus jumped from quarantine facilities before being contained.
Australia has recorded 29,886 cases since the pandemic began. A large proportion was detected in hotel quarantine.
Vaccination roll-out has been gradual, with just 2.5 million vaccines administered in a country of 25 million individuals, each needing two doses.
The prospect of the nation being closed for almost three years will come as a hammer blow to the US$40 billion-a-year tourism industry.
“The hope would be that we might be able to see a few more bubbles set up and we’d be able to see more travel undertaken, but we’re in a pandemic,” he stated.
“It’s going to very much depend on how we’re able to deal with the global pandemic.”
