Singapore makes more sense in expanding flight availability to connect to S.E. Asia, North Asia, India and Europe since it is an aviation hub. Though precisely because of SIN being a hub, it has not been able to escape the 2nd wave of Covid-19 outbreaks, as there were plenty of foreigners and residents returning from Europe that caused the 2nd wave of infections,

Except tests were taking 3-5 days to get the results at that point so it had to be from something earlier. The much more obvious candidate is the Ruby princess, it arrived in Sydney on March 19 so that peak of cases from March 21 - 28 were mostly from that boat and then the restrictions and forced quarantine which came after that kept forcing things down.

I'd also say be very wary of the worldometer site for australian figures when looking at trend because each australian state announces the numbers separately just before and just after the GMT cut-off and not at a consistent time each day (NSW for example does it at 8:00am on weekdays and closer to midday on weekends) so the worldometer site often includes 2 days of a states count in one day and then nothing in the next. When that state is NSW and it has nearly half the cases for the country it creates some quite inaccurate trends. If you're looking at australian trends I'd suggest you look at the https://www.covid19data.com.au/ site.

Yes, the "Fortress NZ" strategy has that implication - elimination, but while herd immunity slowly builds up around the world in a hopefully controlled manner (which is the only path) NZ will be virus free, but with a massive ongoing economic hit and split families etc.

will be interesting to see if NZ regrets their approach once the true infection fatality rates become clear and widely known from serology studies. The more lethal the virus the more their approach makes sense, its easy to get everyone on board when they think they have a 1-3% chance of dying if infected, but 0.3%, may be some dissenters when their dollar drops. Shuttering tourism completely would put them basically in a long term recession on its own no? If there is a delay in the vaccine what is NZ's plan B?

In the medium term there has to be a way for them to safely allow some tourists to return, perhaps an antibody card or something.

It's pretty clear it's not going to be 0.3%. I doubt we will regret it.

Even so, no one knows what long term health consequences are for the 20% that get it and get hit hard.

We might lose tourism but we will gain an open society that can move freely. We don't rely on tourism.

I do think NZ is probably doing the correct thing by eliminating (because we can) if only to create options for later on. But it cant be tolerable to keep the borders shut that long, I think as therapeutic options and testing becomes better there will need to be a mechanism.

In my limited view of the world, not clear what the economic toil of NO travel is. Clear the shelter at home to fix the local transmission is the larger problem. Perhaps the NZ walling of the island looks reasonable given their current class leading metrics.

I'd wager as long as goods can flow country to country the heavy restriction of foreigners and outsiders is a tourist business issue and not much more.

And again, tourism is not something the country relies on, and domestic tourism makes up about half of tourism anyway. If you want to fix the economy, fix covid-19. If you eliminate it, then everyone can move freely, including moving freely to visit other parts of the country. I know I'll be planning trips around the country once we get to lower restrictions.

Tourism around the globe isn't going to suddenly bounce back even if border restrictions do get lifted. We aren't missing out on that. Why would you want to travel to another country and risk getting covid-19 as a foreigner, especially because right now, no one even knows if travel insurance will cover it.

And if NZ and Aus create a travel bubble between themselves, and I’m quite confident that they will, that would be a significant boost to the tourism numbers, especially to NZ. The other thing I’d say is that creating travel bubbles for countries who have managed the virus doesn’t just open up opportunities for tourism but also other business opportunities. Let’s say Taiwan is in that bubble, makes sense as it is probably #1 out of all countries in their handling of the virus, how much more would Australian and NZ companies be looking to Taiwan for things they previously may have bought out of China. How much more education, financial and services trade would occur between those countries because travel could be possible between those countries and not with others. The potential implications of travel bans and bubbles go well beyond simple tourism.

How will NZ and Aus go for a travel bubble if one country is aiming for containment and the other eradication?

If your going to incorporate antibody testing cards or something from auzzis why not from others? I think New Zealand is second to iceland in terms of rich developed nations dependence on tourism no? Yes the country wont collapse without it but it will hurt when other countries tourism sector is bouncing back late this year early next and NZ is still closed waiting for vaccine. That is when the pressure will mount.

it's fine to aim for it now and leave options later true, but all it takes is a couple false negative pcr tests and your back into a lockdown situation, this is a very tricky virus to pen down with asymptomatic spread

I just. I don't. I can't even. Words are failing me. I checked the date for an April Fool article. Or fake news. But it's seems to be repeated in several independent news links.

For context, I have a trip to Easter Island this summer. Tonight I googled "Chile Coronavirus", for their current border & quarantine restrictions, general vibes, etc.

https://www.newsweek.com/chile-count...health-1497775

Can this possibly be?? If so it adds a whole different dimension of thought into hoping to make this trip right now..... 😮😮 ...... or not...

I think both have fundamentally the same aim, eradication or as close to it as you can get. I think you�re getting hung up on words, reality is they both have very similar numbers with Australia just ahead on per capita cases, testing rates and testing results so once both countries are comfortable with letting people move around it will make no difference to extend the bubble to surround both countries. Also keep in mind the countries have a very long and close relationship with things like a right to reside and work between the two in place.

Tourism is important to NZ but not that important. Having a quick google the first two countries I tried were NZ (5.6% of GDP) and France (9.7%) so no, I don�t think it�s as important as you think. Also as has been explained domestic tourism is half the number and of international arrivals Australians make up about half of them (New Zealanders are also the number one source of international arrivals to Australia). More than tourism I would think education would be the big one hit there as for both Australia and New Zealand there are a lot international students, particularly from China, so managing this in the years ahead will be critical. However, if Australia and NZ are seen as safe haven and sensible rules can be created for quarantining international arrivals (quarantine less of an impact because of the length of the visits) this could be turned into an opportunity as well.

Both NZ and Australia have managed the crisis well in part by acting quickly, acting in a bipartisan manner and being pragmatic rather than ideological, I don�t see this changing when it comes to cooperating to open up travel across the ditch.

You are cherry picking your numbers. The same site will tell you international tourism is NZ number one export industry. You can't possibly think that tourism (particularly foreign tourism the relevant issue here) is twice as important for France (home of airbus, multiple car companies etc) as it is for NZ. I'm not saying its the Maldives but foreign tourism going to zero will hurt. https://howmuch.net/articles/travel-...m-economy-2017

There is no as close to it as you can get. This is a highly contagious virus with a short doubling time, you either aim for containment whereby you don't want to overwhelm your healthcare resources and you have ongoing social distancing measures of some kind, or you go extreme and try to eradicate it. The aim of eradication is to get back to normal. If you miss your target when your back to normal and there are a few cases spreading then you have go back into lock down. Knowing what we do now about the sheer number of cases out there that are asymptomatic i think the cat is out of the bag for Aus (they aren't shut down as much as NZ now), NZ still has a (good) chance.

Well, I was cherry picking of sorts, I looked at only two countries, NZ and then picked a western developed country which I thought had a lot of tourism and it the result was that France is a lot more dependant on tourism than NZ in terms of contribution to GDP. You said that NZ was second only to Iceland, you were wrong. And yes, France has other industries, so does NZ by the way, but tourism makes up a significantly larger proportion of Frances GDP than NZ so if international travel stops France will suffer more than NZ. In your analogy, neither France or NZ are the Maldives, but France is closer

On the rest, I think you�re wrong. The vast majority of cases in both NZ and Australia are from overseas so once that has been managed the biggest problem is solved. Next things won�t go back to �normal�, they will go to a new normal. So for example there will be restrictions on places like restaurants and bars, there won�t be nightclubs, conferences, concerts and sporting events with large crowds. There will be beefed up contract tracing with support from things like phone apps. There will be restrictions on offices, a lot more work from home and basically a lot less face to face. This will be the new normal and that new normal will evolve over time to reflect the case load that is being faced.

I�d also say I firmly disagree that the cat is out of the bag in Aus, the fact that we�re a couple of weeks from our peak and are down to around 10-15% of what the numbers were, daily recovered is higher than new daily cases and our overall positive testing rate has come down from about 2.2% to 1.7% with a daily positive testing rate hitting as low as 0.05% suggests that far from being out of the bag the cat has been stuffed, somewhat surprisingly I do have to admit, rather successfully back into the bag.

So you think that link I attached to the world economic forum report and graphic is wrong and your perfunctory google search is more accurate?

You are looking at known cases, of which there are 100s of community spread with unknown source within NSW. That translates into many more in the community (Stanford study released today showed up to 85x more than tests revealed). I do agree that if Aus and NZ achieve eradication than that would be enough to save NZ tourism temporarily

In any case, in some sense it is good that countries like Sweden are taking an approach on one end of the spectrum and NZ on the other. Time will tell and we will all be able to learn from this for the next (hopefully very distant) pandemic.