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Coronavirus: China, Philippines, and Indonesia are last Covid holdouts in Asia to unvaccinated travellers

  • Phocuswright projects that China’s travel market won’t return to pre-pandemic levels until 2024
  • With much of Asia only starting to reopen, holiday-starved tourists have looked elsewhere and booked European holidays, one analyst said

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China, which remains off-limits for tourists, the US, the Philippines and Indonesia are now the world’s only major tourist markets whose borders are fully shut to unvaccinated visitors, barring age or health-related exceptions. Photo: Bloomberg
Bloomberg
Covid-19 vaccines and boosters are losing their importance for world travellers. There are now more countries and territories – 118, according to Kayak.com data – that welcome any US traveller without restrictions. Of the 109 destinations that still require testing, quarantines, or both for unvaccinated travellers, 17 do not allow US tourism anyway.

It’s a welcome turn for a global tourism economy that has been hammered by the novel coronavirus, and a bright note for those looking for signs of the pandemic’s end.

The pullback in restrictions is “an acknowledgement that we’re in a new phase of this pandemic, where things are more stable”, says infectious disease epidemiologist David Dowdy of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. As recently as September 14, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that “the end is in sight” for the pandemic.
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“The world increasingly wants to move past this point where Covid is overpowering our daily lives with everything we’re doing,” says Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

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Singapore lifts indoor mask rule in most public spaces, eases quarantine for unvaccinated travellers

Singapore lifts indoor mask rule in most public spaces, eases quarantine for unvaccinated travellers
Aside from mainland China, which remains off-limits for tourists, the US, the Philippines, and Indonesia are now the world’s only major tourist markets whose borders are fully shut to unvaccinated visitors, barring age or health-related exceptions.
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