Adapting to lockdown

By mid-April 2020, a third of the global population was under full or partial lockdown. While ‘lockdown’ was not a technical term used by public-health officials, it referred to anything from mandatory geographic quarantines to non- mandatory recommendations to stay at home, closures of certain types of businesses, or bans on events and gatherings. During this lockdown period, the travel sector worldwide continued to experience a loss of business. For example, Spain’s famous annual San Fermin bull-running festival, which usually draws thousands of participants, was canceled because of the coronavirus crisis. “As expected as it was, it still leaves us deeply sad,” said acting mayor Ana Elizalde in a statement from the local Pamplona town hall. The July festival, which was made famous in Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, has seldom been canceled in its history. Other major European tourist events were canceled, including Oktoberfest, the famous annual German beer-drinking festival which traditionally sees six million people travel to Munich.