Singapore official pins hopes on China’s reopening
The chief of Singapore’s central bank has said he hopes Hong Kong and the mainland will reopen quicker and more decisively over the next year as their border restrictions may impact business ties between the key Asian financial hubs.
“I would hope that [mainland] China and Hong Kong will be able to open up faster over the next year,” Monetary Authority of Singapore managing director Ravi Menon said in an interview, in response to a question on whether the city state could gain from the different border situations.
As Singapore had strong ties with both, “not being able to travel to these places without considerable frictions does stand in the way of strengthening our business links”, he said.
The divergence between Singapore’s strategy of living with the virus and the zero-Covid policy still pursued by the mainland and Hong Kong has become more stark in recent months.
While Singapore has launched several vaccinated travel lanes, including with the United States and parts of Europe, the mainland and Hong Kong have stuck to strict border measures and notably lengthy quarantines on arrival.
Previous plans for a travel bubble between Singapore and Hong Kong had been shelved repeatedly as cases rose in both cities. Hong Kong eventually said it would drop the idea. The Hong Kong government is instead prioritising opening its borders with the mainland first.
Menon said when Singapore planned to open up, it would want to strengthen links to all geographies, and both the mainland and Hong Kong were important parts of these ties.
The mainland was the island nation’s largest merchandise trading partner last year, while Hong Kong and Singapore compete as key financial hubs in the region.
“I’d very much hope that they would be able to open up more decisively over the course of next year,” Menon said. “That’d be good for Asia. That’d be good for Singapore.”
Meanwhile in Australia, a manufacturer has recalled athome Covid-19 test kits shipped to the US after finding an increased chance of false-positive test results.
The US Food and Drug Administration issued an alert saying the firm, Ellume, had recalled 2.2 million test kits since the matter was detected last month.
A false-positive test result indicates that a person has coronavirus when they do not.
“The FDA has identified this as a Class-I recall, the most serious type of recall. Use of these tests may cause serious adverse health consequences or death,” it said.
The FDA added that it had received 35 false-positive reports and no deaths to date.
Early last month, Ellume announced a voluntary recall of 195,000 test kits after false-positive results were reported in some product batches at higher-thanexpected rates. At the time, the firm had shipped about 3.5 million test kits to the US.
Ellume yesterday said the recall was expanded after new lots were found to be affected.
“Ellume has investigated the issue, identified the root cause, implemented additional controls, and we are already producing and shipping new products to the US,” it said. “We … will continue to work diligently to ensure test accuracy, in all cases.”
In Malaysia, borders would reopen to international visitors by January 1 at the latest, a government advisory council said, as the country seeks to revive its ailing tourism sector.
Malaysia has gradually reopened its economy in recent weeks as infection rates have slowed amid a ramped up vaccination programme. Over threequarters of its 32 million people have been inoculated.
Former prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin, who chairs a council tasked with spearheading the country’s economic recovery programme, said the tourism sector was recovering too slowly without foreigners and noted that operators needed time to resume businesses.
Muhyiddin, however, said infection control measures such as virus tests would remain in place, with authorities to determine entry based on the Covid-19 situation in originating countries, among other factors. He did not state when a date for reopening would be announced, but said the decision was still being discussed by health and security agencies.
In neighbouring Philippines, authorities are banking on returning citizens and a planned travel bubble with South Korea to revive its pandemic-hit tourism sector.
Manila was in talks with Seoul to welcome tourists arriving on chartered flights, Tourism Secretary Bernadette Romulo-Puyat said. The two sides were ironing out quarantine rules for tourists, she said. Manila also planned to ease quarantine rules for returning citizens who could help boost domestic travel, Puyat said.
Domestic tourism, which had driven the sector even before the pandemic, had shown signs of revival, with travellers from the capital now visiting tourist spots as movement curbs were eased and vaccines were rolled out, she said.