Following the Government’s decision, 4 summer addresses will be opened for Lithuanians

On Wednesday, the Cabinet of Ministers decided to add countries to the list of affected countries according to the new indicator. This decision will be open to Lithuanians: Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Cyprus.

It will be proposed to abandon 25 cases for every 100,000. population and link the list of affected countries to our current situation, to include in the list of affected countries those countries where the morbidity rate would be at least 10 percent higher than ours, “said Health Minister A Veryga at a press conference.

According to him, this change will not affect third parties, they will be evaluated separately.

Audronė Keinytė, CEO of the tour operator Novaturas, welcomes this proposal initiated by the Interior Ministry, but believes that this reaction is too late.

“Those countries that will be open to Lithuanians due to this decision – Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Cyprus – will soon end or have already ended the tourist season, so we will be able to implement several flights. These directions will not fundamentally change the critical situation in the tourism sector. What can really improve the situation now, as the ski season approaches, is the division of coronavirus morbidity rates into regional units, ”says the company’s CEO.

Currently, the most relevant regions for the activities of the tourism sector are France, Italy, Austria, Slovakia and Andorra, where Lithuanians like to spend their winter holidays. The division of indicators at the level of autonomous regions would ensure fair competition with tour operators from other European Union countries, such as Germany, Poland or Estonia, since these countries have already adopted resolutions on the resumption of charter flights to epidemiologically safe regions. says A. Keinytė.

These countries have implemented the recommendations of the European Commission and made significant progress. EU countries have also agreed on a common criteria map, in which regions are marked with different colors depending on the epidemiological situation, and countries do not restrict travel to areas where the virus is not widespread.

If the Council of Europe adopts this resolution next Tuesday, we hope that Lithuania will follow the example of other countries. It’s hard to believe, but a new list of third countries in Lithuania has yet to be approved, which would allow tourists to fly to the favorite resorts of Turkey and Egypt in the cold season. We hope that the government representatives will not forget these two aspects when they begin to open foreign countries to Lithuanians ”, hopes A. Keinytė.

At present, countries with an incidence of 100,000 population reaches 25 cases. Isolation for 14 days is mandatory for people arriving or passing through the affected countries, with certain exceptions.