Starting today, fully vaccinated travelers from eight countries can enter Singapore without quarantine, as the city-state eases COVID-19 restrictions and gears up to live with the virus.
Singapore initially fought the pandemic by shutting borders, lockdowns of varying intensity and aggressive contact tracing, but with more than 80 percent of the population fully vaccinated, authorities in the global aviation hub are keen to revive the economy.
It opened travel lanes for vaccinated passengers from Brunei and Germany last month, and today, expanded the scheme to anther eight nations — Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the US.
Photo: AFP
The lane for South Korea is to start on Nov. 15.
Under the policy, passengers will not have to quarantine if they have been fully vaccinated and tested negative for COVID-19 before they depart and on arrival.
“Singapore cannot stay locked down and closed off indefinitely,” Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) said on Oct. 9, when he announced a raft of measures under the “Living with COVID-19” strategy.
He pointed to the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 as a factor.
“The Delta variant is highly infectious, and has spread all over the world. Even with the whole population vaccinated, we still will not be able to stamp it out,” he said.
“Almost every country has accepted this reality,” he said.
In addition to focusing on home care for mild and asymptomatic domestic cases, Lee said Singapore needed to resume international travel.
The city-state is home to the regional offices of thousands of multinational corporations, which rely on Singapore’s status as a business and aviation hub for their operations.
“We must continue to reopen our borders safely,” Lee said. “Companies and investors need to carry out regional and global business from Singapore. People working for them need to travel to earn a living.”
The success of the city-state’s vaccinated lanes project might boost the recovery in the global aviation industry, which was hammered by the pandemic.
“We hope the positive actions taken by Singapore will spur other markets to similarly navigate their pathways towards restarting air travel,” International Air Transport Association vice president Philip Goh said.
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