SINGAPORE – Singapore lifts some border restrictions, but the recovery of its major airline sector remains a challenge given the uncertain trajectory of the Covid-19 pandemic, the country’s transport minister said.
“It remains the fact that it will be long, as while some countries are more advanced in vaccination, others are still trying to vaccinate their population,” S Iswaran told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Friday.
“And at the same time, the virus is in different phases in different parts of the world and therefore countries have also adopted different types of border measures,” the minister said.
The aviation sector contributes around 3% of Singapore’s gross domestic product.
Singapore is a city-state with no domestic air travel market. As a result, its aviation industry and its parent company Singapore Airlines have been hit hard by travel restrictions imposed by countries to limit the spread of Covid.
The Singapore government on Thursday announced several steps to reopen its borders, as it allowed certain groups of travelers to bypass quarantine on arrival in the city-state. These groups include vacant travelers from Germany and Brunei, as well as vaccinated and unvaccinated travelers from Hong Kong and Macao, provided they meet certain conditions.
Iswaran said the “vaccinated travel lanes” agreement with Germany and Brunei could help Singapore’s aviation sector recover.
“But I think we have to be quite realistic that it’s a challenging path and it has to be one in which we accept that there will be a dynamic profile that responds to situations as they evolve,” he added.
Singapore and Hong Kong had planned to launch a long-awaited air travel bubble, which would allow leisure travel without quarantine. The plan was postponed twice due to the rise in Covid cases, and both cities announced Thursday that the travel bubble has been scrapped.
Covid situation in Singapore
Singapore has one of the highest vaccination rates against Covid in the world. About 77% of its population, approximately 5.69 million, has completed its inoculation as of Wednesday, according to the health ministry.
This week, the Southeast Asian country relaxed its social distancing measures. The facility includes increasing the limit on the number of people attending business conferences and live performances, as well as allowing more people to return to their workplace.
Even with Singapore’s high vaccination rate, measures such as the use of masks are still needed to minimize the risk of transmitting Covid, Iswaran said.
“The reason is because vaccination, while providing protection, we need the complement of other safe management measures, especially if we take into account some of the new variants such as the delta, which still has a fairly high transmissibility,” said the minister.