Singaporeans keen to travel abroad for leisure may soon get to do so to places such as the United States, Hong Kong and some parts of the European Union, where vaccination rates are rising.
This was a possibility sketched out by Health Minister Ong Ye Kung yesterday in an exclusive interview with The Straits Times' senior health correspondent Salma Khalik, where he shared the hope that travelling for leisure will be a viable option before the end of this year.
He said: "Once a place's (Covid-19) infection rate is going down, vaccinations are going up and you go below, say, two or three infections per 100,000, we should start monitoring those countries seriously."
In the US, the rate of Covid-19 infections has declined quickly for two months but levelled off since mid-June thanks to localised spikes in undervaccinated regions of the country, data on Monday showed. This comes as the highly contagious Delta variant continues to gain traction, poised to soon become the dominant strain among US cases.
The seven-day average of new daily cases in the US has hovered at around 11,500 since June 16, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, or about 3.5 per 100,000 people. About 47.2 per cent of the population have already been fully vaccinated as at June 30.
When asked if the possibility of a Hong Kong travel arrangement was now back on the cards, Mr Ong said that both cities are now in a good position to relook it. These arrangements have been deferred twice.
"Fundamentally, both of us are more or less in a good place now, and both of us are vaccinating our people," he said.
"We are going to call it the air travel corridor from now on. The word 'bubble' is a bit of a jinx, I think," he added. Earlier in May, the Singapore-Hong Kong air travel bubble burst for the second time following rising community Covid-19 cases in the Republic.
Singaporeans ready to fly to Phuket - which opened its doors to international travellers yesterday - will still have to serve a stay-home notice when they return.
"When we differentiate between countries that are safer and countries that are risky, it is less to do with their own rules... but to do with their general infection rates, vaccination rates, their control measures, testing and all their non-pharmaceutical interventions," Mr Ong said.
Phuket welcomed its first international travellers under a quarantine-free scheme yesterday in a bid to save its vital tourism industry. However, this comes as Thailand is grappling with its worst Covid-19 wave and the detection of the Alpha and Delta variants. Thailand yesterday reported a daily record of 57 deaths from the virus.
