China says inbound travellers will no longer be subject to hotel quarantine and PCR testing. (AP pic)
SHANGHAI: Massive numbers of infections and unaccounted fatalities following China’s loosening of “zero-Covid” restrictions mean that any recovery in international travel to and from the country is likely to be gradual.
China’s planned ending of travel restrictions lifted financial markets in the region Tuesday with the Shenzhen Stock Exchange Composite Index rising more than 1% in midday trading. Chinese online travel platforms, including Trip.com and Qunar, reported a sharp surge in airfare searches with Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea among the popular destinations.
China said Monday that inbound visitors will no longer be subject to hotel quarantine and on-arrival PCR testing requirements. The move is part of the government’s sudden shift to a strategy of living with the virus, as other countries have been doing, reasoning that less-lethal omicron variants are in circulation.
Health authorities have stopped recording all daily cases since Sunday, even as Chinese social media circulated a video of a long line of corpses awaiting cremation at a mortuary.
Highlighting the difficulties facing the travel industry, Japan on Tuesday introduced new measures on travellers from China, such as requiring them to undergo Covid testing on arrival. The Japanese government will not allow airlines to increase the number of flights to and from China.
A spokesperson for All Nippon Airways told Nikkei Asia that the company is “assessing the situation”, and will “carefully monitor the developments” regarding restrictions on the number of flights between Japan and China. Japan Airlines declined to comment on the matter.
“The inbound market has been completely shut and as we have seen in other countries, it will take time for inbound demand to recover,” said independent analyst Brendan Sobie of Sobie Aviation.
China’s border reopening next month will fall into what Chinese epidemiologist Wu Zunyou termed as the first of three Covid-19 waves, which will continue through mid-January. He then sees a second wave from late January to mid-February, triggered by the movement of people ahead of next month’s Lunar New Year holiday and a third from late February to mid-March as people return to work after the weeklong holiday.
China could see some 300,000 Covid-related deaths by April 1, according to an estimate by the Washington-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, with the figure rising to a million by the end of 2023.
China has come under criticism for its abrupt shift to living with Covid-19 without adequately preparing the country’s healthcare system for a surge in patients. Although more than 90% of the country’s 1.4 billion people have had at least two shots, less than 70% of those aged 80 have been fully vaccinated.
“There seems to be a tendency to strive for between 80% and 90% of the population to be infected around the Spring Festival,” Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in the US was quoted as saying in Chinese media. “This will cause unnecessary severe illness and death to elderly who are not well protected,” he warned.
Tuesday’s announcement by Japan of travel curbs on people coming from China cast further doubt on the industry’s recovery. “It seems that it will take time before we see full recovery amid a fresh explosion in Covid cases in China,” a representative for Taiwan-based online travel agency KKday told Nikkei Asia.
Sobie Aviation said making predictions on recovery would be difficult, given the lingering uncertainties.
“It’s so geopolitical,” Sobie said. “Honestly no one really should be making projections or forecasts in the current market environment – or really since the start of the pandemic. It’s unforecastable.”
