Starting today, the government of Puerto Rico will begin trying to stop the recent upsurge of COVID-19 infections by implementing new measures at the Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport.

Although by press time the executive order supporting Governor Wanda Vázquez's announcement had not been published, it was reported that each visitor arriving on the island will be required to provide a negative molecular test result done 72 hours before arrival, proving that they do not suffer from COVID-19.

Passengers who do not bring such documentation, as anticipated in recent days, would have to undergo a molecular test in a lab on the island and would have to remain in quarantine for 14 days while waiting for a negative result. However, it is not yet clear how to monitor visitors' compliance with these standards.

We believe it is imperative to establish regulations at the airport, given that the vast majority of our visitors come from the mainland, where the COVID-19 crisis is hitting harder than ever before. However, we urge authorities to design this strategy with the utmost care and in strict compliance with the law, so that it cannot be challenged, nor does it give way to arbitrary actions.

We also consider it of the utmost importance that visitors and the rest of the population cooperate with measures to address this very serious threat. This is a battle that cannot be fought by the government alone and it is time that we all understood this clearly.

Puerto Rico, which dodged the first wave of COVID-19 in March thanks to a strict shutdown on all government and private activity, is today experiencing a serious upsurge in the spread of a potentially lethal virus. The positivity rate, which was less than 1 percent at the end of the lockdown, is today close to 5 percent. Yesterday, the island reported the highest number of hospitalizations since the beginning of the pandemic. Hospitals warn that if this trend continues, it will soon test the capacity of our healthcare system.

This scenario requires strong and well-thought-out actions. The airport is a major front in this fight.

With a daily average of 58,719 infections in the last week, the United States' COVID-19 outbreak is currently in its worst moment. During the first three months of 2020, Puerto Rico received 939,646 visitors from airports in the mainland, most of them from Florida, which is now the epicenter of coronavirus crisis in the United States.

Yesterday, the Luis Muñoz Marín Airport received 33 flights from Florida, a state that recorded 75,291 new infections last week. According to authorities, several of the recent outbreaks in Puerto Rico, such as in Guayanilla and Yauco, were caused by people arriving from the United States.

This current scenario makes it clear that airports have to be a top priority when trying to ensure the safety and health of our island's residents. Since March, the government has been implementing different strategies seeking to determine who arrives with the virus and to tracing them once they are here. None has been particularly successful.

This time, failure cannot be an option again. Here, not only the life and health of the entire population of Puerto Rico is at stake but also our already fragile economy, which suffered a hard blow during March and April. Nothing is more important than those aspects in this complicated moment and our authorities must act now, without any further pretext, to rise to the occasion.