translated from Spanish: Tourism biosecurity project advances in Los Ríos region

This week the Regional Government of Los Ríos and its Regional Council held the launch ceremony of those benefiting from the Competitiveness Innovation Fund (FIC), including the Biosafety in Tourism project of the Universidad Austral de Chile, an initiative that seeks to install the culture of biosecurity as a strategy of competitiveness in tourism-related companies in the Los Ríos Region and already has several advances and projections.
This project, which has a contribution through the FIC-R of $93,000,000, is the result of an alliance between the health and tourism sectors, which hopes to install a continuous and sustainable process, where companies generate skills to reduce the risk of acquiring other infectious diseases such as stationary infections even beyond the current emergency generated by Covid-19.
Romané Véliz, project manager and academic at the Institute of Nursing at the Universidad Austral de Chile, mentioned that “one of the relevant aspects of the project is that tourism services have demonstrated progressive progress in quality and safety standards in different fields. However, the current situation has shown us that biosecurity must be a protagonist in this process. And tourism sectors must respond by adapting their services and experiences to biosafe standards in limited times. With this project we hope to collaborate in this process, delivering differentiating and competitive elements to the regional tourism sector, based on restoring the trusts, both workers, entrepreneurs and visitors, for a revival of the sector”.
Advances and upcoming actions
Regarding the progress of the project, Romané Véliz detailed that he is at a discussion stage that involves testing the different methodological models in pilots, which includes training lines, enablement, dissemination, initial diagnosis and a self-diagnosis process of beneficiaries to evaluate internal skills in the ability to establish processes based on risk.
Mauricio Triviños, co-director of the project and academic of the Institute of Tourism of the Universidad Austral de Chile explained that they are “in the process of piloting, what we call as tourist areas for public use, where they work with parks such as the Parque Urbanos El Bosque and Saval, as well as cultural public areas such as the museum, the Teatro Cervantes and the craft fair in Lago Ranco”.
“At this stage of piloting, the project’s dissemination and traceability tool and the training associated with the biosecurity incorporation process in tourism companies are being tested,” added the tourism professional.
In addition this week they began with training and inductions on capacity calculation for companies that are in the piloting, the scope of the project at this stage and how to use the traceability tool for service providers. They will start with five pilots and at the end of the month the tool will be installed and working, and then proceed to select the first 20 that add to these 5 piles to work biosecurity elements in tourism.

Original source in Spanish