Mauritius is a country reliant on tourism. The sector accounts for roughly a quarter of the island’s GDP.
As the deadly outbreak of a novel coronavirus rages on. The vast majority of cases remain largely restricted to China itself. But vendors in the Mauritian capital’s central marketplace… are worried.
CGTN spoke to one market vendor Abdus Samad who says”From what I’ve heard this is a very serious illness – there’s no medicine for it. Here on the island of Mauritius, we receive a lot of tourists. We are very afraid.”
Of the island’s 1.3 million annual visitors, roughly 7% are Chinese. For people like tour operator Xia Lei, those travelers represent his bread and butter.
“We approximately account for about ten percent of the Chinese tourists in this country.During these two or three days, we continue to receive a lot of cancellations and also we receive some changes, some guys want to change the date to April or to May, but most of them will cancel the vacation.”
Confirmed cases of the disease now number in the thousands. Many African governments already have strict measures in place to monitor inbound travelers. While many in Mauritius support the country’s current quarantine policies, some are calling on the government to go further.
