The once-thriving tourism industry in Egypt has been decimated by lockdowns and travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Officials in the country hope that recent finds can lure back some of the market.
But since the COVID War was launched in 2020, the country, like others that depend on tourism, suffered a 69-percent drop in international visitors during the first eight months of 2020, according to The New York Times.
The country has been promoting a recent discovery of about 100 wooden coffins, which included some that contained 2,500-year-old mummies. Khaled el-Enany, the country’s tourism and antiquities minister, told the paper that besides the coffins, funerary masks and other statues were located in Saqqara, a town outside Cairo. There was also a 3,400-year-old city discovered in the country.
“This unique site is still hiding a lot,” he said, according to the paper. “The more discoveries we make, the more interest there is in this site and Egypt worldwide.”
The country spends a significant amount of money on upkeep. The Times reported the country spent $6.6 million over 14 years to renovate the Djoser’s Step Pyramid, which is 4,700 years old.
“Tourism in Egypt just had one of its best years in 2019, and then came the pandemic which severely impacted it all,” the general manager of one of the country’s largest tour operators told the paper.
Reuters reported the country hopes to make about $7 billion in 2021 and see about 60 percent of the tourists it had in 2019, with a particular eye on Russia.
TREND FORECAST: It should be noted that Egypt, a nation of 103 million people, has recorded 3,500 virus deaths since the COVID War began in 2020, or 0.0131 percent of its population. Over 14 months, that virus death rate equals the tiny fraction of 0.00093 percent per month.
Yet, as if economic conditions weren’t bad enough before the COVID War broke out – and tourism, which accounts for 15 percent of the country’s GDP, is now dying – it will get worse.
A week ago Sunday, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi declared another three-month extension of a nationwide state of emergency.
