Originally Posted by
Reply1984
I agree that we need to reopen for essential traveling, but I am just very pessimistic about travel bubble before we have vaccines.
The concept of travel bubble was brought by Australia-New Zealand. Then Thailand tried to open their border to some selected countries. Hong Kong also reached out to find suitable partners. However, is there any meaningful travel bubble operating currently? Only the Mainland China-Macau one. And don't forget Macau never had unlinked local cases(only imported cases and their close contacts). I believe we may face a looooooooooooooong way before Hong Kong government can build up travel bubble (at least for business travelers) with any one of those 11 countries, and maybe at that time, we already get vaccines.
Depends what you call travel bubble. SIngapore does have one for essential travel with Malaysia, China and a couple of others (not Hong Kong). In Europe there is a travel bubble with around 11 non-EU countries. UK has a fairly wide list of exempt countries (they call it travel corridors).
Vaccines are the hope, but uncertain that they will succeed.
O far we have several "theoretical" vaccine in Phase 3.
A large number of volunteers are inoculated with the vaccine and they check if there are side effects (the oxford university/astrazeneca has been paused because of a potential serious side effect) and how people react to it. Then the volunteers would need to be exposed to the virus to see if they are protected and how long the immunity lasts (could be just a few months even assuming nu virus mutation). The FDA states that a vaccine would be useful if it protects more than 50% of vaccinated persons, not a very high hurdle. A vaccine typically takes years to be tested and adopted. With fasttrack, preliminary results of sufficient generality will take many months. Widespread vaccination before that (assuming little side effects) would be a gamble.
Doing nothing until a vaccine has proven successful and can be produced and inoculated worldwide is silly. Limiting access to HK residents and mainlanders is badly hurting. Business travel has to reopen.