THAT wasn’t exactly how Singapore’s Minister For Trade and Industry, Chan Chun Sing, phrased it Wednesday morning (April 7) at the Tourism Industry Conference but that was what he meant when asked what vaccinations would mean for Singaporeans travelling out and visitors coming in.
“We should not be looking for a binary change,” he cautioned, saying “it’s not that one day, you can’t travel and suddenly you can”.
Instead, it’d be a progressive change – “progressively opening up with countries that are able to keep the pandemic under control” and “progressive across travel types – business travel, niche travel and mass travel”.
Speaking in the Q&A session after his speech to the industry, challenging them to transform and reinvent global travel, he detailed the various milestones towards progressive opening – continue to keep infection rates down, increase the rate of vaccinations and lastly, to determine if the vaccinations afford ‘sterilising immunity’, meaning vaccinated people cannot transmit the disease.
“If that’s the case, then we can open earlier,” he said.
Currently, results coming in from US, Israel and various sources are showing positive signs that the vaccinations do afford ‘sterilising immunity’. (Watch this interview with Dr Anthony Fauci on CNN, where he tackles this question).
Minister Chan said the efficacies of vaccines against new variants have also to be tested. “The faster the transmissions, the greater the mutation. We are not safe until everyone is safe. We have to watch the mutations and match those with the efficacies of the vaccines. That will determine the speed of opening.”
In the meantime, he said Singapore is not waiting for conditions to be right to start talking to like-minded partners to agree on mutually-assured protocols. “We start talking now so we can then press the button when we are ready,” he said.
As an indication of its desire to open borders, Singapore is the first government to accept the IATA Travel Pass for pre-departure checks for inbound travellers, from May 1.
Speaking at a media conference, Keith Tan, chief executive of the Singapore Tourism Board, said it hoped other governments would follow suit but declined to comment if Singapore would also accept other travel passes such as CommonPass.
“We have to find ways to enable travel and the IATA Travel Pass is one of the possibilities – we are open to other solutions,” he said.
The government is also working through what vaccinations will mean for the ongoing “cruises to nowhere” which have so far seen more than 120,000 take advantage of the open ocean as a means of getting away, as well as local attendees participating in business events. Will they need to get tested prior as they have to now? Currently, vaccinated folks do not need to be tested for MICE events, but protocols around cohorts, currently limited to 50, have yet to be finalised? Whether the waiving of testing for cruises will happen remains to be seen.
Currently, the vaccination status of residents is displayed in the TraceTogether app used for safe entry everywhere, as well as in the HealthHub app. How that will be integrated into some form of travel “passport” that enables overseas travel also remains to be answered.
All these measures are an indication of the determination of the Singapore government to open things on the ground as much as possible, safely.
For example, Minister Chan said it took “a lot of gumption on our part” to reopen the cruise industry and shared a data point that currently, Singapore was carrying a third of global cruise passengers, at a time of course when cruising has literally stopped globally.
“We didn’t ask, should we or shouldn’t we? We asked, how do we do it? That spirit keeps pushing us to break new ground and test new concepts.”
That same spirit also pushed it to open and test safe business events. To date, a total of 60 pilot events have been held, attended by close to 9,000 attendees. A far cry from pre-Covid when the MICE sector supported more than 34,000 direct and indirect jobs with a value add of S$3.8 billion to the economy, but a big step forward as it gears up to host the World Economic Forum in August with protocols still being worked out. It has now pushed the 250-delegate limit to 750. And it will open two new offices in San Francisco and Brussels to continue to build a strong MICE industry.
And that is what the two chiefs kept reiterating in their messages this morning to the industry – break new ground and test new concepts because “please do not expect to go back to ‘business as usual’”, said Tan in his speech.
“Because if we go back to doing things in the same way, we would have wasted this crisis and will be unprepared for the next crisis, which will most certainly come. But if we successfully address these challenges, we can ensure Singapore will be an attractive and compelling destination through 2030 and beyond.”
• Featured image credit: Chaz Bharj/Getty Images