Why Medical Tourism Is Drawing Sufferers, Even in a Pandemic

“Our market has always been what I call the ‘working poor’ and they are getting poorer,” said Josef Woodman, CEO of Patients Without Frontiers. “The pandemic has wiped out low-income and middle-class people around the world, and for many of them the reality is that they have to travel to get access to affordable health care.”

After the initial global lockdown to contain the spread of the coronavirus, medical travel bookings fell more than 89 percent in popular destinations including Mexico, Thailand, Turkey and South Korea in April Medical departments, a Bangkok-based medical travel agency. The numbers have been slowly recovering since August, but bookings in Mexico that have seen one American travelers increase in recent months they are still 32 percent lower than in the same period from August to December 2019.

“Covid-19 has destroyed the entire medical tourism ecosystem due to the uncertainty about travel restrictions and quarantine measures that are constantly changing around the world,” said Paul McTaggart, the agency’s founder.

“Even so, we are still seeing a growing number of people who travel and book trips to meet their urgent health needs, particularly between the US-Mexico border where patients can safely travel by car,” said McTaggart. The Center for Medical Tourism Research found that Google searches for the terms “Mexico medical tourism” in the US has increased 64 percent since July, compared to the prepandemic before travel restrictions were introduced in March.

“Google searches correlate almost directly with consumer behavior when traveling across borders,” said Vequist.

Before the winter coronavirus resurgence, Ms. Jackson had begun planning and saving a trip to Mexicali, a border town in northern Mexico, where she can do a hysterectomy for $ 4,000, one-fifth the cost of the procedure on offer in New Jersey. Her best friend had offered to drive her there and pay for the gas and accommodation.