Canadian Thomas O’Shaughnessy is on the golf course, under a sunny sky with the beautiful blue sea only steps away.
The self-employed fund manager worked for three days solid in his suite at a Fairmont hotel, with a view of the harbour, so he could free up the morning.
It’s the kind of life that most of us can only imagine living in a pre, or post-COVID world.
O’Shaughnessy says he found a safe haven in Bermuda, where the government has implemented a strict regime of testing and isolation in order to open up its economy to tourists and temporary residents who apply to the Work From Bermuda program, which allows people to work remotely from the island for up to a year.
A sort of digital nomad who can work from anywhere, O’Shaughnessy felt unsafe in the Central American country where he had been living with his wife during the pandemic after infections neared one in 10, and so he went looking for another place to live.
With a daughter in British Columbia, and his mother in a senior’s home with cancer, O’Shaughnessy was looking to live somewhere that was relative close to home. His mother has since passed away.
He applied to stay on the island under the Work from Bermuda program, which launched in August.
“It’s extremely safe here and we’re allowed to leave so I can go back to Toronto,” said O’Shaughnessy, who is planning to visit his daughter this month. “I do have to quarantine to see family. But at the end of the day it’s a very flexible environment and the testing process coming back into Bermuda is extremely strong. So it’s been really quite a calming influence.”
Visitors to the island are required to get tested a week before they arrive, and upon arrival, are tested again and isolated in hotel rooms to await the lab results, which can take from six to eight hours. At the four-day mark, they are tested again.
If they remain on the island longer, they take two more tests — one at the eight-day mark and another in 18 days to ensure they are not carrying the virus. A $75 fee covers the tests in Bermuda.
The testing regime, implemented by public health, has been a success and infections have stayed relatively low.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rates Bermuda a one out of four on its travel health notice levels, a scale which considers infection rates, positivity and hospital admissions to determine the risk to travellers. One is low, and four — which is Canada’s ranking — is very high, which means travel to the country should be avoided.
But travellers still present a risk.
About 30 per cent of the island’s total cases have been imported, either due to visitors or residents returning to the island on flights. And since late November, there has been a spike in COVID cases. Bermuda now has more than 200 active cases.
Canada too has had its share of imported cases, although the percentages are much smaller because of our higher case counts. In the first two weeks of December, there were more than 70 international flights to Canada with a confirmed case, as well as a case on 75 domestic flights.
However, unlike Canada, the island hasn’t had widespread community transmission since reopening in July, said Glenn Jones, interim CEO of Bermuda Tourism.
“Our testing regime is not designed to make sure our cases are zero,” Jones said. “It’s designed to find the positive case at the border, isolate that person, make sure they’re not in contact with others so that case doesn’t become five, or 10, or 15.”
The country went into a lockdown in April. Residents were subject to a curfew and people could only leave their homes for food or medical necessities.
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“It was very difficult,” Jones said. “Hotels closed essentially, and thousands of people were suddenly out of work.”
Residents worked at home and only left the house to exercise. They were allowed to go to the grocery store on a designated day of the week, said Jones.
“It was really difficult,” he said.
But the country reopened in July and since then, the tourism economy has improved.
“It’s a very slow recovery, obviously, but we’re really energized that we’re seeing it, month to month, get better and better,” Jones said. Hotels “are not doing anything near what they ordinarily would do at that time of year. But they see enough business to bring people back to work and open up the doors again.”
In July, air traffic was about 10 per cent of what it would have been in a normal year, and leisure visitors were at five per cent. By October, air traffic was a third of what it should have been and visitors were up to a quarter of their normal volume.
More than 60 per cent of hotels have reopened to some extent.
The tourism industry is only six per cent of Bermuda’s GDP, but it employs up to 4,000 people and in 2019, visitors spent half a billion dollars.
Until this pandemic, Canadians were the second largest nationality to visit the island after Americans.
But Jones speculates that not as many Canadians are visiting because of the two-week quarantine requirements upon return, and instead it’s visitors from the U.K. who are in the second spot. U.K. residents don’t have the same requirement because of Bermuda’s relatively low rate of COVID-19.
Although O’Shaughnessy is now living in an island paradise, he says he’s still experienced many of the hardships of the pandemic, including being uprooted from his home in Central America, the difficulty travelling and self-isolation upon his return to Canada, and the restrictions around visiting his mother in a seniors home before her passing.
“At the end of day it was a situation that really brought home to roost the challenges for Canadians with seniors either in a long-term-care facility or in a seniors residence. It was very difficult to be able to get to see her,” O’Shaughnessy said. “I touched every corner of this COVID experience.”
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