Photographer: Giuseppe Cacace / AFP / Getty Images
Photographer: Giuseppe Cacace / AFP / Getty Images
Dubai hopes one of the world’s fastest vaccination programs and rapid testing technology will help achieve the goal of holding the Expo 2020 event this year, after the coronavirus pandemic forced the delay.
The government is confident that the inoculation programs will be successful enough to open the exhibition on October 1 and says it is still possible that 25 million people will visit the city for the six-month event.
The Expo, which Dubai has been preparing for a decade, is expected to be one of the most important events this year worldwide and generate billions of dollars for the government. The resurgence of the virus in recent months has complicated planning and raised questions about whether the size should be reduced.
Tokyo, which will host the Olympics in July, faces similar problems, although authorities there also insist the event will move on.
“It’s just not realistic to change your target number because your factors are super fluid,” Reem Al Hashimi, CEO of Expo 2020, said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. “We have deployed vaccines in the UAE very aggressively, but so have many other countries in the world.”
The United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is a part, has administered almost 1.8 million doses of vaccine and has the second rate of inoculations per 100 people worldwide after Israel. The country has also led the tests per capita and Al Hashimi said there will be a testing center.
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“We hope that in October, things should be better than where we were when we had to postponing the event last April, “Al Hashimi said.
Dubai is fulfilling its schedule to host this year’s late Expo 2020
Dubai is also revisiting the legacy of Expo 2020 as a commercial and residential space. The pandemic has exacerbated a fall in property in the emirate, the Middle East’s shopping center, where oversupply and economic uncertainty have pushed prices down for years.
“We won’t try anything if it no longer makes sense,” Al Hashimi said. However, due to the peculiarity of the place, “we do not rule it out completely. We take some parts where it makes sense, but we are also redesigning what the general programming of the legacy of the place would be like ”.
He said the future of the site will still “be leaked with technology because it is a 5G site.”
Expo 2020 will open up sustainability pavilion to the public from January 22 to April 10. The opening of the new pavilion is a “teaser for the national public,” as well as the international one on Dubai’s idea of sustainability, Al Hashimi said.
– With the assistance of Desley Humphrey