Maldives offering vaccines to their visitors

Jenna Zuraiki, Features editor, The Pawprint 

Maldives is one of the first countries to fully reopen to tourists ever since the pandemic. They are striving to be ahead of the game when it comes to vaccinated tourists. They have announced plans to offer vaccines to tourists that arrive in the Maldives, to hopefully lure more visitors over. 

The country’s minister of tourism, Dr. Abdulla Mausoom, has announced that the Maldives is developing a scheme called a ‘3V tourism’, this scheme would allow tourists to “Visit, Vaccinate and Vacation.” According to Dr. Mausoom, the country has planned to offer two doses of the vaccine to the tourists which means they would have to remain in Maldives for several weeks. He says he hopes that this program will help boost tourism on the island, which had an average of 1.7 million visitors a year before the pandemic hit. 

However, tourists that want to book this “3V” scheme still need to wait, at least for now. The “3V” scheme will not go ahead until the country’s entire population is fully vaccinated. Mausoom says “The main idea of tourism being open is to provide a reasonably safe tourism with minimum inconvenience”. 

So far 53% of the population has received the first dose of the Covid vaccine.