EODY, Greece’s Public Health Organization announced on Sunday that it has recorded 907 new cases of the coronavirus in the last 24-hour period, which marks 590 fewer instances of the virus than the 1,497 cases recorded on Saturday.
According to the EODY announcement, there are 497 patients with COVID-19 on ventilators on Saturday, which is 13 fewer than the day before.
A total of approximately 20,000 coronavirus tests were conducted across the country during the past 24-hour period, which is almost 30,000 fewer compared to those conducted on Saturday.
Tragically, 30 more people suffering from the coronavirus passed away in the country over the past 24-hour period, which represents one more individual compared to those who died with the virus on Saturday.
Tourist industry uncertain due to Coronavirus pandemic
Tourist industry officials and organizations are predicting that tourist flows to Greece from abroad will start to pick up significantly from late June or early July onward, the deputy president of the Greek hoteliers union Christina Tetradi told state-run AMNA news agency on Sunday.
At the same time, May was almost a ”dead” month for Greece’s tourism as foreign arrivals were almost non-existent.
Most of the country’s hotels have already postponed their opening for after mid-June.
Roughly 10 percent of Greek hotels have opened after the official start of the tourism season in mid-May with most of them waiting until the coast becomes clear with respect to Greece’s main markets.
These include the UK, Germany, Russia, and Scandinavian countries, such as Norway and Sweden.
Meanwhile, tour operators were pressing for ever-lower prices and their flights were arriving with few passengers on board.
It was essential for Greece to become green on the ECDC map, Tetradi emphasised, saying that this will be the deciding factor for the last-minute travellers.
She highlighted June 7 as a key date, when the UK will announce whether Greece will go ‘green’ for Britons, meaning that they don’t have to quarantine on their return.
The season has also got off to a slow start on Rhodes, where only 25 of its 650 hotels are now open, while roughly a quarter are open in Heraklion on Crete.
Mayors in smaller island destinations, meanwhile, report a more hopeful picture and said that the fast vaccination on islands, combined with low cases, have generated confidence, with bookings coming from Greece, France, Germany and Italy, as well as Balkan markets, in July and August.
According to Michael Vamiedakis, founder of a hotel chain and the Deltanet Travel agency, another key factor that would play a crucial role in the coming months would be avoiding bad developments on the pandemic front in October and November.
A potential new wave of cases in the months of early autumn in 2021 would be disastrous for 2022, as this is when the flight planning for the following year is done and hoteliers and travel agents start negotiations for new contracts and bookings for the coming year.
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