And while schools that are greenlit for reopening must have handwash stations and social distancing markers, downtown Belize City doesn't have any of those, and it showed during the weeks of Christmas shopping as throngs of Belizeans stormed the stores. But it's bittersweet - it may add to the rising COVID numbers but it does great things for our rebounding economy. And while yesterday we showed you a few businesses who compared their sales to pre-COVID, the president of the Belize Chamber Commerce and Industries, Marissa Longsworth, says the country isn't quite there yet.
Marissa Longsworth, President, BCCI
"So far I made checks and we haven't collected formal data yet, we probably do that in the new year to get an idea of what things are looking like, but from my checks around the current figures actually are looking - there was a boost in November, December coming around to the Christmas, but for the most part the figures are not necessarily exemplary to say that okay people were spending excessive amounts of money. Maybe they were spending their money at home, but there still the question as to how much money was really available within the system to be spent and so that also has an impact for the bottom-line for the businesses as well, because it could be that persons bought their gifts here that they would have generally shipped in or gone over the border for. But maybe instead of buying 2-3 gifts they only bought one and so it kind of end up balancing itself off when you look at the revenue side of things. It was certainly definitely a bustling holiday season, but I think it's yet to be seen from the merchants in terms of when they look at their actual reports whether they had numbers that were better than pre-covid times or even up to pre-covid times, certainly better that last year which is not a good comparison, but I haven't heard so far that we are looking at pre-covid or better in terms of sales."
