India has reopened its borders to mass foreign tourism, ending a 20-month clampdown as COVID-19 infections across the country remain low and vaccination rates rise.
After halting tourist visas in March last year, India is now allowing quarantine-free entry to fully inoculated travelers from 99 reciprocating countries. The government only requires such visitors to monitor their health for 14 days after arrival.
From last month, tourists on chartered flights were already being granted entry and Indian authorities expanded that to arrivals on commercial flights yesterday.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Many Indians have already been flocking to domestic tourist hot spots in the past few weeks, such as the western coastal state of Goa and the mountainous north, as a deadly second COVID-19 wave faded out after triggering peak infection rates of more than 400,000 cases a day in early May.
Families also gathered together this month to celebrate Diwali, the country’s largest festival, with new cases staying well below 15,000 a day.
India’s immunization campaign has also gathered pace, with more than 1 billion vaccine doses administered, while antibody surveys say that most Indians have already been exposed to COVID-19.
While national infection levels have in the past few weeks touched lows last seen earlier in the year, there are concerns that the easing of curbs risks a complacency similar to when India experienced an ebb between its two major waves.
Cambodia yesterday also reopened its borders to fully vaccinated travelers, two weeks earlier than originally planned, as it emerges from a lengthy lockdown bolstered by one of the world’s highest rates of immunization against COVID-19.
The program allows visitors to skip quarantine measures if they are fully vaccinated, test negative 72 hours before they enter the country and test negative upon their arrival.
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen decided to move up the opening from Nov. 30 to start revitalizing the country’s economic and social activity as soon as possible, buoyed by the fact that 88 percent of Cambodians are now fully vaccinated.
“The situation has changed,” Hun Sen said in an audio message shared on social media.
The previous plan had been to phase in the reopening by initially restricting travelers to two seaside provinces, but the new scheme means fully vaccinated travelers are free to visit anywhere in the country after a negative test.
Unvaccinated travelers would still have to undergo a strict 14-day quarantine upon arrival and undergo a series of COVID-19 tests before they can travel further.
In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, Cambodia received 6.6 million foreigners who accounted for nearly US$5 billion in revenue. Most of them visited the famous Angkor Wat temples in Siem Reap Province and seaside destinations, Cambodian Tourism Ministry said.
Last year, the number of visitors dropped sharply to 1.3 million, and earnings from them plunged to about US$1 billion.
The Cambodian Ministry of Health yesterday reported 52 new COVID-19 cases and five deaths.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
North Korea yesterday fired a ballistic missile, Seoul’s military said, about a week after US President Donald Trump approved South Korea’s plan to build a nuclear-powered submarine. Analysts have said Seoul’s plan to construct one of the nuclear-driven vessels would likely draw an aggressive response from Pyongyang. South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said North Korea fired an unidentified ballistic missile toward the East Sea, referring to the body of water also known as the Sea of Japan. The missile landed in the sea outside Japan’s economic waters and no damage or injuries had been reported, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said. The missile
RSS