Right now, most dive employees are living off their pension contributions, which government allowed everyone to withdrawal. At some point this is going to end, and the dive sector for the most part will implode. The residents and locals have been quite good at supporting the dive ops, but in a recent CITA meeting, the question was asked, how much of your annual revenue are you bringing in now? Most answered less than 5%. That's obviously not sustainable. Work permits are not getting renewed, and many dive employees are forced to leave the island. There are companies who have let 80-90% of their staff go. If the borders were to open tomorrow, they'd take months to get back up to speed, just in recruiting new staff.
The Cayman Islands Government has sort of backed us into a corner. We are now COVID free, so well done. However if we open our borders, we will no longer be COVID free. If we remain shut, our economy will slowly grind back to the 1960's. I believe our only hope is some sort of rapid testing, but I'm not optimistic on that either. Think of how long the Saturday queues are (were) at the airport just for customs. Add a medical test onto that, it will be madness.
It seems from chatting around, there's about 5-6 dive ops on the island still running the odd trips. There are other dive ops who I see on FB posting they are out and about, but this is mostly the owners exercising the boats and doing some social media. I haven't seen them have actual customers aboard. The rest have literally shut the doors.
