THE Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) has vaccinated four-fifths of its registered tourism workers, according to the Department of Tourism.
Tourism Secretary Berna Romulo-Puyat revealed that overall across the country, some 51.40 percent or 126,097 of 245,338 registered tourism workers are already vaccinated.
Metro Manila currently has the highest ratio of vaccinated tourism workers at 94 percent, followed by Davao with 88 percent, and the CAR, which has 80 percent of its tourism workers inoculated against COVID-19.
Tourism frontliners classified as A1 in priority are those working in accommodation establishments temporarily operating as quarantine hotels or isolation facilities, while the A4 category tourism workers are those employed in other tourism-related businesses.
“Vaccinating our tourism workers is the only way we can continue to sustain the recovery of domestic tourism, especially with the presence of a new virus variant,” Puyat said.
“As we work to secure more vaccine doses that will help us achieve a 100 percent vaccination rate among tourism workers in the A1 and A4 priority groups, I am also encouraging our workers to submit themselves for vaccination especially with the presence of the Delta variant,” she added.
Early in September, Baguio City teamed up with the DOT to vaccinate some 7,500 tourism workers, coinciding with Puyat’s visit to the city.
However, most of the Cordillera Region remains closed to outside tourism, including Baguio City, following the severe spikes of COVID-19 incidence in the region.
