Singapore well placed for more visitors

Singapore's high vaccination rate and effective pandemic management will help mitigate the risks of opening the city-state's borders to more countries, health experts said.

After a brief pause in December due to the spread of the highly transmissible Omicron variant of COVID-19, Singapore has resumed its plan to allow fully vaccinated travelers to come in without having to undergo quarantine, under the Vaccinated Travel Lane program.

Transport Minister S. Iswaran said on Feb 16 that the program will now include Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. These three are in addition to the 24 nations that are already in the program.

Singapore will also increase the daily quota of travelers from 5,000 to 15,000.

Iswaran made the announcement a day after Singapore registered a record 19,420 new coronavirus infections. While this figure might seem daunting for a densely populated place like Singapore, infectious disease experts note that most of the cases are mild and that a highly vaccinated population will ensure that the risk of infection spread will be reduced.

"The risk to opening up Singapore for travel is lower now compared to before … (because) we have achieved a very high level of vaccination. The population at large is actually very well protected by vaccines," said Teo Yik Ying, dean of the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at the National University of Singapore.

Over 90 percent of Singapore's 5.4 million people are fully vaccinated, while 66 percent had received their booster shots as of Sunday, according to the city-state's Ministry of Health.

Teo said that travelers who come in through the travel lane program are not only fully vaccinated but are "tested fairly rigorously".

Supervised test

Under the program, travelers will need to take a supervised antigen rapid test within 24 hours of their arrival. This measure started on Tuesday and replaced the previous practice of conducting an on-arrival PCR test at Changi airport.

Paul Anantharajah Tambyah, president of the Asia Pacific Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infection, said the "overwhelming majority" of the new cases in Singapore are locally transmitted, and that imported cases made up only a small proportion over the past few weeks.

The health ministry reported that Singapore posted another record high on Tuesday with new cases hitting 26,032. But only 301 of those cases were imported.

Tambyah feels that Singapore is in a position to expand the travel program and move on with the living-with-COVID policy.

"While there are some stresses on the healthcare system, a lot of that is because of an abundance of caution which guides the management protocols," he said.

Hsu Li Yang, vice-dean of global health at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health in NUS, said: "Thankfully, with (Singapore's) high vaccination rates, we have been able to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed.

Hsu said Singapore cannot afford to close its borders for a long time, adding that "it will be too costly from a socioeconomic perspective to try to eliminate COVID-19 from Singapore, now that it is so firmly entrenched in most of the world".

Vijay Verghese, editor of the online magazine Smart Travel Asia, said Singapore is treating COVID-19 as "an ongoing reality".