Governments must agree to unified international travel protocols, such as systematic Covid-19 testing of passengers before flight departures and shun imposing mandatory quarantines upon arrival that are crushing demand, tourism and travel executives said.
Common standards will help revive the travel and tourism industry that has been hard hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, executives at the Tourism Tomorrow webinar said on Wednesday.
"Quarantines don't help, people won't travel because the rules change every week... don't bet on a vaccine, we need to create a new normal with a testing regime," Peter Brun, chief communications officer at visa services firm VFS Global, said during the panel discussion.
"What's important is that governments work together to establish one key regime. To have common procedures and standards is the way forward to survive the winter."
Global airlines are facing a grim winter as a resurgence of Covid-19 infections and travel restrictions decimate demand.
Setting harmonised travel protocols goes beyond coordination between the government and private sector, and should be agreed upon between governments around the world to ease the impact on economies and the industry, Elie Tabchouri, Google's head of Public Sector and Telco units, said.
International Covid-19 test protocols for departing international passengers at airports, which could ease the slump in air travel, are expected to be ready within four weeks, Gloria Manzo Guevara, chief of the World Travel & Tourism Council, said on Monday.
Once travel restrictions ease and vaccines are introduced, passenger confidence will increase and travel could rebound by the second quarter of 2021, Mr Brun said. However, the industry will not return to its pre-crisis levels until 2023.
Demand for leisure travel will recover sooner than business trips as companies increasingly rely on technology for remote meeting, Jaki Ellenby, director of Marketing and Events at Global Village, said.
The Covid-19 crisis will force the tourism industry to embrace digitalisation faster as it copes with new norms and changing needs of travellers, Mr Tabchouri said.
"Covid has injected a sense of urgency and need," he said. "Covid made it a necessity, even a responsibility, to digitalise."
Sinopharm vaccine explained
The Sinopharm vaccine was created using techniques that have been around for decades.
“This is an inactivated vaccine. Simply what it means is that the virus is taken, cultured and inactivated," said Dr Nawal Al Kaabi, chair of the UAE's National Covid-19 Clinical Management Committee.
"What is left is a skeleton of the virus so it looks like a virus, but it is not live."
This is then injected into the body.
"The body will recognise it and form antibodies but because it is inactive, we will need more than one dose. The body will not develop immunity with one dose," she said.
"You have to be exposed more than one time to what we call the antigen."
The vaccine should offer protection for at least months, but no one knows how long beyond that.
Dr Al Kaabi said early vaccine volunteers in China were given shots last spring and still have antibodies today.
“Since it is inactivated, it will not last forever," she said.
Pharaoh's curse
British aristocrat Lord Carnarvon, who funded the expedition to find the Tutankhamun tomb, died in a Cairo hotel four months after the crypt was opened.
He had been in poor health for many years after a car crash, and a mosquito bite made worse by a shaving cut led to blood poisoning and pneumonia.
Reports at the time said Lord Carnarvon suffered from “pain as the inflammation affected the nasal passages and eyes”.
Decades later, scientists contended he had died of aspergillosis after inhaling spores of the fungus aspergillus in the tomb, which can lie dormant for months. The fact several others who entered were also found dead withiin a short time led to the myth of the curse.
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Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
