On Saipan, the tourist area resembles a ghost town. Restaurants are being shuttered, shops reducing hours, resorts and water parks sit empty.
The Northern Marianas, a US territory in the North Pacific, is meant to be humming at this time of year. March is normally the height of the visitor season, with tens of thousands of tourists flying in from three big markets: China, South Korea and Japan.
But as these countries have been gripped by the coronavirus Covid-19, the Marianas’ tourism-dependent economy has crumbled. Tour groups and flights from China have stopped altogether, numbers from South Korea have shrivelled.
“Tourism is the only economy here,” said Gloria Cavanagh, a resort owner and the chair of the Marianas Hotel Association. “It is a huge crisis here.”
While no cases of Covid-19 have been confirmed in any Pacific countries, the effects of the reductions in tourist numbers, a lack of airfreight, and a withered supply chain are already hitting several countries hard, with grave fears about how fragile economies would weather a prolonged outbreak.
It’s also forced countries into the position of isolating themselves for public health at the expense of the industries on which they are most dependent.
To offset the arrival of the coronavirus, most Pacific countries have imposed strict border controls. Vanuatu, New Caledonia, French Polynesia, and Tonga have brought in health checks and turned away cruise ships in recent weeks.
At a news conference, Cook Islands Prime Minister Henry Puna said 11 cruise ships would be prohibited from the pa enua – the outer islands – in the next two months and travellers from 16 countries would be banned from entering.
Each cruise ship arrival brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars, but Mr Puna made no apologies, saying the government would not compromise the well-being of its people for economic gains.
“The world doesn’t have anything to counter it with – that’s what makes it so serious,” Mr Puna told the news conference. “It’s everything to do with what is best for this little paradise.”
But some of the strictest measures are in Samoa, which was devastated by a measles epidemic which arrived in November and swept through the country killing 83 people, mostly children.
As of Thursday, all people entering the country – including returning Samoans – needed a medical certificate. All cruise ships were banned, the number of flights to the country had been slashed, and no planes bigger than an A320 or 737 were allowed to land.
The chief executive of the Samoa Tourism Authority, Fa’amatuainu Lenata’i Suifua, said while he understood and supported the government’s actions, especially in the wake of the devastation wrought by measles, the country’s biggest industry was in for a tough time.
“It’s quite a really big impact as we have more than 5000 employees in the industry as well as supporting services,” said Fa’amatuainu. “We’re trying as much as possible to keep the industry afloat.”
In the measles epidemic, hundreds of holiday bookings were cancelled, and the economy was kneecapped when the country was effectively shut down so authorities could wrestle to contain the outbreak.
“For the last quarter of the financial year, we’re expecting a 20 to 25 percent drop in terms of the arrivals as well as the earnings from the industry,” said Fa’amatuainu. “So it’s quite a really big impact.”
Fa’amatuainu said people were only starting to make bookings again when Covid-19 emerged and now things were heading back to square one, a devastating regression for an industry which, until October, had recorded year-on-year growth and was about to launch a new marketing push in Asia.
“A lot of the hotels, a lot of the properties have already reported cancellations as well as a decrease in terms of the bookings and sales,” he said.
Neelesh Gounder, an economist at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, said the coronavirus outbreak was rapid, and there was still not enough data to quantify what the overall impact on the region’s economies would be.
But he said a negative impact was almost certain, with uncertainty already eating into tourist numbers, the flow of goods and business from China, Australia and New Zealand, and the flow-on effects from any global slowdown.
If the outbreak was prolonged, Dr Gounder said it could possibly affect island countries’ wider economic relationships with China, including aid projects and the grand Belt and Road initiative, where projects have already been hit by delays and quarantine measures preventing Chinese labourers from reaching building sites.
While the South Pacific may have been relatively sheltered from the outbreak in China, concerns had mounted now the virus had arrived in Australia and New Zealand.
“We now cannot say that the Pacific is really not going to be largely impacted,” said Dr Gounder, who added that how much the Pacific is impacted by Covid-19 will come down to how the region’s two big economies handle it.
In New Zealand, where the measles epidemic in Samoa originated, foreign minister Winston Peters said in a statement that the government was partnering with Pacific countries to ensure they were prepared for, and able to respond to, the threat of the coronavirus.
New Zealand and Australia would jointly fund the World Health Organisation’s Pacific coronavirus response plan, Mr Peters said, and it would test samples from the region free of charge.