Tourism board chief says quarantine here to stay

MGTO director Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes

The government expects that quarantine upon arriving in Macau will be enforced for a relatively long time, the Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) director Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes said yesterday on the sidelines of the meeting of the Second Standing Committee of the Legislative Assembly, which met to discuss the new Hotel Business Law.
This justifies the measures announced on Monday. which state that Macau residents going into quarantine a second time will be required to pay their own hotel quarantine bills.
“The people [being quarantined] were those that returned to Macau in March and then in June and July,” Senna Fernandes said.
“From September, we think that we might have people that left Macau [in June and July] to study or for other reasons, who will wish to return to Macau once again. Because quarantine requirements will continue for some time, the government has decided that people undergoing a second quarantine [at designated local hotels] must pay the bill,” she said.
From September 1, Macau residents who have already undergone a 14-day quarantine at a designated quarantine venue in Macau and were exempt from payment will have to pay for hotel quarantine if they arrive in Macau from countries or regions that are considered high-risk.
When asked about the MGTO’s expectations for the number of visitors that could visit Macau in the coming days, Senna Fernandes said, “we are not making any forecasts at the moment since the conditions are very different when compared to before the pandemic. […] We have a very conservative outlook since the ways of traveling within the mainland have changed.”
The MGTO director noted that the lack of a requirement for a negative nucleic acid test result in order to travel between different provinces on the mainland has not yet been extended to include Macau.
“Tour groups have already been authorized but this does not include Macau either, and for individual people, they might also be scared of the possibility of being infected during the trip, so they are avoiding these trips for the time being,” she said.
For Senna Fernandes, the most important work being done at the moment is not on the promotion of tourism products but in “restoring confidence that people can travel to Macau without the risk of being infected with the virus.”
According to figures cited by the local tourism director, since border restrictions with the neighboring city of Zhuhai were eased earlier this month, there was an influx of “just above 9,000 visitors” at its busiest point.