In a major development that counts as a huge achievement in the ongoing efforts to defeat the coronavirus, not only in the country but worldwide, the State of Qatar has fully vaccinated over 1.5 million people against COVID-19. The Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) on Friday revealed that 1,538,870 people have received both doses of the COVID-19 vaccine bringing the number of fully vaccinated up to 65.5 percent of total population.
Last week, the Cabinet approved the start of the third phase of lifting of restrictions. The well managed phase-wise plan of lifting of restrictions was reflection of government’s remarkable achievement of keeping people safe during the pandemic.
Apart from this, many important decisions have been announced, including resumption of issuing tourist and family entry visas from tomorrow, revoking of exceptional entry permit requirement for residents and visitors with work visa and waiving of hotel quarantine requirements for travellers with double dose of COVID-19 vaccines. Also, all unvaccinated children below the age of 18 years arriving in Qatar have been exempted from hotel quarantine if their parents are fully vaccinated. All these measures have changed the atmosphere of the businesses giving hopes to the most affected sectors such as tourism and related businesses of hospitality and travelling. The new travel policy coming into effect tomorrow, that has classified countries into three categories – green, yellow and red, will benefit businesses as more people will now be able to travel from Qatar and visit here. The mandatory hotel quarantine was discouraging many people from travel as they wanted to avoid additional financial burden.
“Many tourists and travellers, especially from Asian countries, were holding back their plans of coming to Qatar because of mandatory hotel quarantine. Now, Qatar will start issuing tourist visa and mandatory quarantine requirement will also be not required. These two announcements will give a big boost to tourism in Qatar,” as a senior official from the tourism sector was quoted by The Peninsula as saying.
The great hope given to the people by the gradual lifting of the restrictions imposed to combat the COVID-19, for trade, business and travel sector, does not mean that the battle against this epidemic is over. Therefore, there is still a need for each individual to observe the preventive measures to protect himself, his family and the entire society from the virus, and to avoid return of these measures and restrictions again. People’s cooperation and understanding to their role to combat this pandemic, and their awareness will remain pivotal to get rid of the coronavirus epidemic once and for all.
