Athens announces Greece is opening up for tourism
Tourism in Greece is to be ramped up again from May 15, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced in a televised speech on Wednesday evening. Covid-related restrictions will be relaxed in the coming weeks, with restaurants and cafés reopening from May 3. Commentators are emphatically unenthusiastic.
Making the same mistake twice
Web portal TVXS writes incredulously:
“The Nea Dimokratia government has not learned from its mistakes as it falls into the trap of opening up to tourism for the second time. The first time was last summer. In a country that had no epidemiological burden, it decided to open up for tourists without special precautions or conditions, bringing thousands of Covid cases into the country. ... And now it is doing this again. In a country that for the last three weeks has occupied first place in Europe in terms of deaths per one million inhabitants, the government has decided to relax the measures and lift the bans to facilitate the opening of the tourism industry.”
Well so be it!
Blogger Pitsirikos comments sarcastically:
“As all Greeks have now realised, Greece is the country that has been closed to its citizens since November and will be opened to tourists in May. ... How do we avoid the lockdown next winter? Very simple: we don't let the tourists go home. The mistake we made last September was to allow tourists to leave. If they had stayed over the winter it would have been impossible to decide to go into lockdown, because tourism is our country's heavy industry. ... So: this summer, give sleeping pills to the Belgian and German families and hide them in the cellar.”