JAKARTA, July 9 (Xinhua) -- Tourist destinations in Indonesia's Bali resort island reopened as of Thursday with tight health protocol implementation after a three-month partial lockdown, according to an official.
The tourist sites in Bali started welcoming local visitors, while thousands of foreign holidaymakers stranded during the coronavirus outbreak on the island may have public activities before the island is open for them in September, Head of the Bali Provincial Tourism Office Putu Astawa said.
"Bali is open today (Thursday) only for the tourists from the island," the official said, adding that visitors from other parts of Indonesia will be allowed to visit the resort island on July 31.
The tourists will face stringent rules in the tourist destinations, hotels, restaurants and beaches on the island which is home to over 4 million people, Astawa remarked.
To deter the crowd from turning up as an effort to rein the transmission of COVID-19, the number of visitors to the destinations is limited, the official said as quoted by local media.
As the center of the Indonesian tourism industry, Bali was visited by about 700,000 foreign holiday makers every month before the virus pandemic, according to data from the National Agency of Statistics.
On Thursday, the Health Ministry reported 53 additional COVID-19 cases in Bali with one new fatality, bringing the total cases to 2,024 and the total fatalities to 26.
The hotel occupancy rate tumbled to 2 percent in May from 62 percent in December, according to data from the Bali provincial administration. Enditem
