The threat of new and highly contagious variants of Covid-19 should not impact the direction of the Marcos administration to open up the country to tourists and investors as Tourism Secretary Christina Frasco disclosed on Tuesday, Oct. 25, that current tourist arrivals of more than 1.8 million surpassed earlier projections.
She said this after also announcing that President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. will soon issue an executive order to make mask-wearing indoors voluntary.
Frasco explained that the Omicron XBB subvariant and XBC variant were taken up during the recent Cabinet meeting, but she maintained that the Philippines “cannot go on in a pandemic perspective, because we have to give our country an opportunity to thrive while maintaining basic health protocols on one hand and safeguarding and protecting livelihood and the economy on the other.”
“It is not a mutually exclusive exercise wherein implementing the easing of these travel restrictions efforts towards managing the pandemic would cease because it continues to be managed by the DOH,” the secretary furthered.
Frasco shared that “there is great interest in the Philippines” because of Marcos’ “position of prioritizing travel and tourism as a priority agenda of his administration and the sense of optimism and hope that has reverberated across the Philippines.”
Presently, tourist arrivals reached 1,827,603, exceeding the previous projections of the Department of Tourism (DOT) before June 30 that international arrivals would only reach 1.7 million by December 2022.
READ: Marcos agrees to make indoor face mask use voluntary — DOT Sec. Frasco
The recently-concluded Philippine Travel Exchange, which is the biggest government-led travel exchange organized by the Tourism Promotions Board, was also a success because the “numbers are record-breaking.”
Sales during the event reached P173 million, the Tourism secretary said, stressing how this figure surpassed the previously highest-achieved sales of P94.8 million in 2018.
“What this tells us (is) that the Philippines remains a top-of-mind destination all over the world, only that we need continuously improved and enabling mechanisms of coming into the Philippines and this is exactly the direction that the Marcos administration has taken in easing travel protocols as well as the other programs and plans of the Department of Tourism under this administration,” she asserted.
Meanwhile, she also argued that despite the mandate to make mask-wearing outdoors and indoors voluntary, the DOH continues its vaccination and booster campaigns to protect the population.
Frasco also explained that the new mandate doesn’t mean people are not allowed to wear masks.
Rather, it “leaves the choice to the individual whom we trust to make an informed choice about mask-wearing.”
Citing that Covid-19 positive cases in the country are down by 2.8 percent since September and 22.74 percent as of Oct. 22 despite the Marcos administration’s shift to voluntary mask-wearing outdoors, Frasco maintained that this follows what they had seen from the neighboring countries in the Southeast Asian region.
"The lifting of the mask mandate in no way led to any surges in the majority of these countries,” she said.