HK tourism recovery looks positive, vaccines to help hasten efforts

The recovery of Hong Kong’s tourism industry looks positive as the city relaxed social-distancing measures, reopened two theme parks after they suspended operations for more than two months. COVID-19 vaccines will also bring confidence to the recovery of the city’s economy.

Hong Kong’s economy, which has been under siege from social unrest and the global pandemic for years, has suffered from a series of bad news. Analysts said pulling Hong Kong’s economy out of the mire will still be a challenge for the local government.

Hong Kong Disneyland reopened on Friday. It was the third reopening for the theme park since pandemic began. Its reopening followed Ocean Park, which reopened a day earlier.

The restart of the theme parks came as the local government vowed to relax tough social-distancing rules for the first time since November, as the city has seen a drop in new COVID-19 cases, to single digits, in days.

Official data showed that the jobless rate in Hong Kong in January was the highest in more than 16 years, and the global travel industry to Hong Kong was at a near standstill. Specifically, the number of global visitors to Hong Kong in January was only 4,370, a year-on-year drop of 99.9 percent.

The Hong Kong government hopes to win the war with the help of the vaccine. The city, with more than 7 million people, has purchased 22.5 million COVID-19 vaccine doses. The first batch of 1 million Sinovac vaccine doses from the Chinese mainland arrived in the city on Friday.

The government announced it will roll out COVID-19 vaccinations for five priority groups next week.

Hong Kong is expected to be in the first batch of countries and regions in the world to get widespread COVID-19 vaccine coverage among its citizens by the end of 2021, the Economist Intelligence Unit forecast in January.

“The government is trying to restore business order while ensuring the public’s health and safety. The vaccines bring hope, and the government will soon take more policies to stimulate the economy,” Li Xiaobin, a Hong Kong studies expert at Nankai University in Tianjin, told the Global Times on Friday.

Matthew Cheung, chief secretary for administration of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government, said in a Sunday blog that as long as the city wins the war on the epidemic, Hong Kong will be able to resume normal business with the Chinese mainland and achieve a steady economic recovery.