The Cayman Islands want to reopen tourism during the coronavirus pandemic by creating “resort bubbles”.
Tourists would not be allowed outside of the resort area in case they were infected.
Even conceptually, this is turning out to be difficult to think through.
Keeping visitors within the confines of the resort is simple enough.
The problem is that resort staff might become infected and spread the virus outside the resort.
Hotel staff will have to adopt the protocols of medical professionals and wear personal protective equipment.
In the USA, hotel staff are often immigrants who live in large, multi-generational households whose members are essential workers who labor side-by-side with other immigrants from large, multi-generational households.
The possibility of rapid transmission throughout society is therefore significant.
Recently proposed and aborted “travel bubbles” between “safe” countries might prove to be a harbinger of the resort bubbles now being contemplated.
Not long ago, nations like Australia and New Zealand that had dramatically driven down their case numbers had planned to open their borders with one other.
That cannot happen because the dynamic nature of pandemics is for the disease to reappear and spread suddenly and rapidly, which is exactly what happened in Australia and New Zealand.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/tourism-bubbles-asia-reopening-coronavirus/index.html
Relatedly, there is the possibility of resort guests infecting one another, with resort hotels becoming global superspreaders.
A resort might become identified with the reinfection of entire nations and continents, permanently soiling the reputation of resorts which once seemed so exclusive.
In terms of guests and staff becoming infected, reopening resorts boils down to one question:
Are guests going to be wearing face coverings indoors in public spaces?
Because if a resort opens a nightclub or a bar, everything will fail badly.
Resorts will then become microcosms of the five-stage incompetence that has characterized the Western response to the coronavirus pandemic:
- Failure to take basic precautions — masks, distancing, testing — forces lockdowns.
- Medium-risk businesses are closed unnecessarily.
- Without safe outlets for their energies, some violate lockdown and perpetuate infections.
- After lockdown, countries open up their borders and high-risk activities to tourists.
- Rising infections compel countries to enter another lockdown.
https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/covid-19-coronavirus-infographic-datapack/
Who would want to even travel during a pandemic?
Tourists who visit resorts might have to go into quarantine for two weeks when they return home, making travel less appealing.
Moreover, the affluent tourists who attend resorts stay home anyway during pandemics.
This touches on a subject that most people do not seem to fully grasp.
On the one hand, there are official lockdowns that force people to stay home.
On the other hand, even when there are no official lockdowns, as cases soar, people tend to stay home.
Who in particular stays home?
- affluent people
- older people
- educated people
Again, this describes the kind of people who go to resorts.
It incidentally describes the kind of people who tend to vote.
It also describes Sweden.
There was no official lockdown in Sweden because the Swedish constitution had no provisions for a lockdown.
Instead, the Swedish government advised its citizens to stay home when they could.
The Swedes stayed home because they are a very trusting and obedient people.
The Dutch love to debate everything in their parliament, but the Swedes happily go along with their government without a fuss.
https://www.newsweek.com/coronavirus-sweden-norway-death-toll-mild-flu-season-1532201
Sweden has been singled out amid the pandemic for not legally imposing lockdowns as many other countries, including its European neighbors, did. It instead gave citizens guidance on how to act during the pandemic. Shops, restaurants, and gyms remained open, but schools and universities were closed to over-16s. Public gatherings of more than 50 people were banned, and over-70s and those with COVID-19 symptoms were told to self-isolate. It has also not mandated face mask use.
One example of Swedish obedience and naivety is the Swedish movie star Kristina Söderbaum, who is most famous for her role as the heroine in the 1940 Nazi propaganda film “Jud Süß“.
Her family explained her clueless complicity by describing her Swedish childhood, in which the mailman would simply leave his mailbag hanging from a tree for all to fetch their mail.
Sometimes, the mailbags contained envelopes filled with cash, but no one would steal them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristina_S%C3%B6derbaum
The passive, gullible obedience of the Swede contrasts starkly with the cynical, knowing, sometimes reluctant obedience of the German.
The first movie about the sinking of the Titanic was made in 1943 by the Nazis, and supposedly has served as the template of subsequent Titanic movies.
The director was Herbert Selpin, who surreptitiously altered the movie to make it critical of the Titanic’s officers and, by extention, of the Nazi leadership.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Selpin
To understand how Swedes obeyed their government’s call to stay home in a way that helped to limit economic damage, one must understand the material conditions of Sweden.
Scandinavian countries have highly advanced economies which have some of the highest rates of people working from home.
https://www.statista.com/chart/20743/share-of-employed-people-who-usually-work-from-home/
During the pandemic, many affluent urban Swedes decamped to the countryside, reducing the population density of the cities.
With a population of 10 million people, there are 600,000 summer houses in Sweden.
Up to half the population of Sweden has access to a summer home through family and friends.
Also, Swedes have the smallest household size in the world, with an average of 1.8 members per household.
Perhaps up to half of all Swedes live alone, limiting household transmission of the coronavirus.
Again, Sweden had no official lockdown and instead submitted to a regime of voluntary avoidance.
As a consequence, in the second quarter of 2020, the Swedish economy contracted by 8.3%, while the American economy shrunk by 9.5%.
In contrast, the South Korean economy shrunk by a mere 3%.
Instead of either official lockdowns (USA) or voluntary avoidance (Sweden), Koreans engaged in simple precautions, thereby keeping their economy open and running.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/economic-decline-in-the-second-quarter-of-2020
The Americans and the Swedes face the moral disgrace of having two of the highest national Covid death rates despite being economically advanced.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53780196
Sweden has had a high Covid death rate perhaps because of the absence of personal precautions like face coverings.
The Swedish government might have not pushed for face coverings because it assumed that older Swedes and those with underlying health issues would be sequestered.
If younger Swedes were to become infected, it was thought to be of no effect, and their infection would help the country attain non-vaccine herd immunity.
Swedish public health officials deny that they were aiming for a policy of non-vaccine herd immunity, but they always ended up talking about herd immunity as a goal.
Journalists found it disturbing that whenever Swedish epidemiologists talked about the pandemic, they would say “According to our models….”
They always referred to the projections of their models rather than to the uncertain nature of the disease itself.
One problem with pandemics is the uncertain nature of complex biological phenomena.
Just as most people — including some scientists — cannot comprehend exponential growth, neither do they seem to grasp the fundamental UNCERTAINTY of complex phenomena.
For example, attitudes toward pandemics are based on the experience of prior pandemics, which are themselves still poorly understood and often misapplied.
For example, the idea of a “second wave” of Covid in the flu months is based on what was reported during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.
But Covid might be less like the Spanish flu and more like Zika, which silently deforms and cripples much more than it kills outright.
Overconfident college students who go to parties where they know they will contract Covid are sure that they will not suffer from the symptoms of the disease.
They might not realize that their internal organs and vascular and neurological systems may be secretly and permanently altered and compromised.
They may think that they will harmlessly acquire immunity, but the coronavirus may not actually offer much long-term immunity.
Instead, they may be buying a permanent underlying complication that will kill them the next time they are infected.
https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-reinfection-case-confirmed-us.html
Another parallel would be the ongoing HIV-AIDS pandemic, which killed 770,000 people in 2018.
After almost forty years, there is still no vaccine for HIV-AIDS, and people have simply modified their behavior to avoid it.
https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/12/hiv-death-rates-768×542.png
Modified behavior in the face of the coronavirus means wearing a mask when indoors in public.
But when cases surge, it also means that most people will stay home voluntarily, Swedish-style, crippling the economy.
Along these lines, educated, older, affluent people may tend to decline the opportunity to travel as long as the pandemic persists.
While the Cayman Islands contemplates the intricacies of resort bubbles, other Caribbean islands are trying something different.
Barbados, Bermuda and Jamaica are trying to remake themselves into places to live for remote workers during the pandemic.
Quarantine in a hotel room for two weeks might be tolerable if it was a prelude to a one-year stay.
