I went to Thailand shortly after the covid lockdowns ended, and the corals were all coming back. I talked to a boat captain about it and his comment was: “yeah, there were no tourists to abuse them”.

I can’t help but wonder what effect tourism (and lockdowns) has had on corals. For example, It is common among scuba divers to only use mineral sunscreens because standard off-the-shelf sunscreen floats on the top of the water and blocks UV from the corals