Joint statement on tourism & COVID-19: UNWTO, WHO call for responsibility, coordination

Joint state­ment from WHO & UNWTO: Mad­rid, Spain and Geneva, Switzer­land, 26 Feb­ru­ary 2020 – As the cur­rent out­break of the Coronavir­us Dis­ease (COVID-19) con­tin­ues to devel­op, the World Health Organ­iz­a­tion (WHO) and the World Tour­ism Organ­iz­a­tion (UNWTO) are com­mit­ted to work­ing togeth­er in guid­ing the travel and tour­ism sec­tors’ response to COVID-19.

On 30 Janu­ary 2020, the Dir­ect­or-Gen­er­al of the World Health Organ­iz­a­tion (WHO) declared the out­break of COVID-19 to be a Pub­lic Health Emer­gency of Inter­na­tion­al Con­cern and issued a set of Tem­por­ary Recom­mend­a­tions. WHO did not recom­mend any travel or trade restric­tion based on the cur­rent inform­a­tion avail­able. WHO is work­ing closely with glob­al experts, gov­ern­ments and part­ners to rap­idly expand sci­entif­ic know­ledge on this new vir­us, to track the spread and vir­ulence of the vir­us, and to provide advice to coun­tries and the glob­al com­munity on meas­ures to pro­tect health and pre­vent the spread of this outbreak.

Cooperation is key

The tour­ism sec­tor is fully com­mit­ted to put­ting people and their well-being first. Inter­na­tion­al cooper­a­tion is vital for ensur­ing the sec­tor can effect­ively con­trib­ute to the con­tain­ment of COVID-19. UNWTO and WHO are work­ing in close con­sulta­tion and with oth­er part­ners to assist States in ensur­ing that health meas­ures be imple­men­ted in ways that min­im­ize unne­ces­sary inter­fer­ence with inter­na­tion­al traffic and trade.

Tourism’s response needs to be meas­ured and con­sist­ent, pro­por­tion­ate to the pub­lic health threat and based on loc­al risk assess­ment, involving every part of the tour­ism value chain – pub­lic bod­ies, private com­pan­ies and tour­ists, in line with WHO’s over­all guid­ance and recommendations.

UNWTO and WHO stand ready to work closely with all those com­munit­ies and coun­tries affected by the cur­rent health emer­gency, to build for a bet­ter and more resi­li­ent future. Travel restric­tions going bey­ond these may cause unne­ces­sary inter­fer­ence with inter­na­tion­al traffic, includ­ing neg­at­ive reper­cus­sions on the tour­ism sector.

At this chal­len­ging time, UNWTO and WHO join the inter­na­tion­al com­munity in stand­ing in solid­ar­ity with affected countries.

WHO’s COVID-19 updates.

Everything above the WHO’s COVID-19 updates link was copied and pas­ted from a UNWTO media release and pub­lished from a phone. 

Your cor­res­pond­ent has just booked flights to Bangkok from Perth. Damn the coronavir­us. (And bless the cheap fares!)