Tag: Coronavirus Reopenings

Major Covid Holdouts in Asia Drop Border Restrictions

Chin@Strategy

HONG KONG — After two and a half years of tight pandemic controls, some of Asia’s last holdouts are opening their borders, as they move to bolster their economies and play catch-up with a world that has largely learned to live with Covid. Hong Kong said on Friday that it would abandon mandatory hotel quarantine for people coming to the city starting next week, following a similar move by Taiwan. Japan said it would drop its daily limit on arrivals and fully open its doors to tourists on Oct. 11.…

Your Tuesday Briefing: Political Turmoil in Pakistan

Chin@Strategy

Good morning. We’re covering political turmoil in Pakistan and schools reopening in the Philippines. Political tensions swell in Pakistan Imran Khan, Pakistan’s former prime minister, was charged under the country’s antiterrorism act on Sunday. He is trying to stage a political comeback after he was ousted from power in April following a no-confidence vote. The charges followed a rally in Islamabad, the capital, where Khan condemned the recent arrest of one of his top aides and vowed to file legal cases against police officers and a judge involved in the…

Tourism Begins to Revive in New York, but Not Among Chinese

Chin@Strategy

After two years of sparse crowds in Times Square and other popular attractions, New York City is finally hoping for a robust rebound of visitors this year. But the city will still be missing a main driver of its prepandemic tourism boom: big spenders from China, whose government has yet to allow travel abroad. Before the pandemic, China was the fastest-growing source of foreign visitors to the city, with more than 1.1 million Chinese tourists arriving in 2019. Their impact on New York’s economy was supersized because they tended to…

Chinese Tourists Aren’t Coming Back Any Time Soon

Chin@Strategy

On Jeju Island in South Korea, the markets have gone dark. In Bangkok, bored hawkers wait around for customers who never come. In Bali, tour guides have been laid off. In Paris and Rome, the long lines of people with selfie sticks and sun hats are a distant memory. This was supposed to be the year travel came back. In Europe and Asia, many countries reopened their airports and welcomed tourists. But they are confronting a new reality: Variants such as Omicron are causing global panic, leading governments to shut…

The Delta Variant and China’s Need to Change Its Covid-19 Policy

Chin@Strategy

“How lucky I was born in China,” a young Chinese scholar declared last month in his WeChat. He was proud: Following the worst domestic Covid-19 outbreak since Wuhan, China had brought daily new case counts down to a few dozen. The case numbers — when contrasted with the United States, which has less than a quarter of China’s population yet daily average cases above 130,000 — might not seem too concerning on their own. But they illustrate that China’s zero-infections policy is no longer working as designed. At the outset…

More Vaccine Mandates

Chin@Strategy

Fully endorsed The F.D.A. granted full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus shots for people 16 and older yesterday, the fastest vaccine approval in the agency’s history. (Although, perhaps, not fast enough.) President Biden seized on the moment. “If you’re a business leader, a nonprofit leader, a state or local leader, who has been waiting for full F.D.A. approval to require vaccinations, I call on you now to do that,” he said. “Require it.” It gives companies more cover to impose vaccine mandates and industry groups more ground to lobby local…