All Nicaragua entry requirements related to Covid-19 are now over says Health Minister Martha Reyes. Effective immediately, travelers no longer need to provide proof of vaccine or a negative test to enter Nicaragua.
It’s been months, thankfully, that we’ve written about Covid and the various rules and regulations surrounding travel to Central America during the pandemic. The reason is simple. Nothing much has happened. Since March, when Honduras finally lifted its Covid entry requirements, all of Central America has been back to normal. All, of course, except for that consistent outlier Nicaragua.
But now there’s news! News which will, we hope, finally condemn the whole Covid nightmare to history and ensure we never have to mention it again. Yes, at last, at long last, the Republic of Nicaragua has caught up with the rest of the region and finally abolished its Covid entry requirements.
We’re not sure how many countries around the world still require travelers to provide a negative Covid test or proof of vaccination, but we don’t think it’s too many. China and a few others? What we can say is that Nicaragua was the very last in Central America to do so, holding out until yesterday.
Health Minister Martha Reyes said the decision was made based on World Health Organization data that Covid no longer constitutes an “emergency situation”.
‘It is crucial to confirm that the entry requirements previously mandated for the country included presenting a vaccination card for children aged 3 and above, or, for unvaccinated individuals, presenting a negative PCR test. These requirements are no longer needed, and anyone entering the country is not required to present any Covid-19-related documents,” said Reyes yesterday in a press conference.
Toman en cuenta las declaraciones de la OMS y retiran el requisito de la prueba negativa o tarjeta de vacunación a viajeros.https://t.co/9QpSrGSxqu
— LA PRENSA Nicaragua (@laprensa) July 23, 2023
All we can say is better late than never
The biggest irony of all this is that during the pandemic, Nicaragua was the one country in Central America with zero internal Covid regulations. It had some convoluted entry requirements which made it almost impossible for airlines to serve the country, but once you were in, you were good. It’s strange that they’re so late in abolishing these. All we can assume is that the Ortega regime simply wants to be seen to be different from everyone else. This would also explain their ludicrous rules with the airlines during the pandemic. Maybe it’s as simple as that? A need to be contrarian.
But whatever. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that now, effective immediately, no country in Central America persists with any of these ridiculous Covid entry regulations and that’s a very good thing. It’s been a long time coming. And hopefully, it means that this is the last time we ever have to write about Covid in this region.
Well, we said we’d keep updating this until the bitter end, the day that ALL Central America is FINALLY free of all its ludicrous Covid entry requirements, and we have. Hopefully this is the very last time we need to update this:https://t.co/ws988F8Jv6
— Central America Living (@VidaAmerica) July 23, 2023
When did each Central American country drop its Covid entry requirements?
To give you an idea of how late Nicaragua is to the party, here is when each country ended their own Covid entry requirements:
1. El Salvador (November 2021)
2. Costa Rica (April 2022)
3. Belize (July 2022)
4. Guatemala (August 2022)
5. Panama (September 2022)
6. Honduras (March 2023)
7. Nicaragua (July 2023)
