(Hong Kong) Hong Kong will lift a mandatory hotel quarantine for people arriving from overseas, the chief executive announced on Friday, ending more than two and a half years of international isolation of the financial hub .
Posted at 9:51 a.m.
“The quarantine hotel system will be abolished” from September 26, John Lee told a press conference.
Travelers will, however, be required to undergo a PCR test upon arrival and will not be allowed to go to bars and restaurants for the first three days.
And tourists still run the risk of being isolated in a hotel room, or in the worst-case scenario, being sent to a quarantine camp, if they test positive for the coronavirus upon arrival in Hong Kong.
Quotas for arrivals from mainland China will also be scrapped, the government said.
The long-awaited lifting of the restrictions will bring relief to residents and businesses who have been demanding that the Asian financial center follow the global trend by once again allowing unrestricted travel.
The government was facing increasing pressure from residents, business leaders and even some of its own public health advisers to end the quarantine, especially after an epidemic wave earlier this year. .
21 days
Since then, the number of local infections has greatly exceeded that of infections from abroad, but the authorities have chosen to maintain the quarantine rules.
At the height of the restrictions, the duration of isolation at the hotel reached 21 days. These rules have caused a major exodus: 113,000 people have left the city since mid-2021, according to official data.
The economic cost has been significant. The city is currently in a technical recession after recording a decline in GDP for two consecutive quarters.
“There is a high probability that Hong Kong will experience negative GDP growth this year,” the city’s finance secretary Paul Chan warned Thursday.
“For Hong Kong to truly regain its competitiveness vis-à-vis other cities in the world, the announcement is not enough. Hong Kong should be fully connected to the world without hindrance,” said the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, Eden Woon.
Its Hong Kong airport was once one of the busiest in the world. The number of passengers this year is only 3.8% of the pre-pandemic level.
Influx of connections
The websites of Hong Kong airline Cathay Pacific and its low-cost subsidiary HK Express were slowed down on Friday by an influx of logins.
But Hong Kong is unlikely to suddenly return to mass tourism.
Over the past two years, many airlines have reduced their routes or stopped serving the city altogether.
In a statement, Cathay Pacific said it would add 200 round trips in October to regional and long-haul destinations.
The company had warned earlier this year that it could not increase its routes by more than a third this year, having difficulty hiring staff and finding planes.
And flight prices have skyrocketed. Even before Friday’s announcement, the cost of a ticket to Los Angeles or London was more than double what it was before the pandemic.
Reopening
Hong Kong has applied a more flexible version of the Chinese “zero-COVID-19” strategy, which notably imposes multiple confinements as soon as positive cases appear and quasi-compulsory PCR tests every 72 or 48 hours.
Measures such as mandatory hotel quarantine for people arriving from overseas — up to 21 days — have been enforced in this special administrative region of China throughout the pandemic period and have eradicated the first wave of the pandemic, when it caused many deaths around the world.
But this international center has not managed to keep the virus out indefinitely and has not implemented large-scale containment measures, such as those affecting entire cities in mainland China.
The Omicron variant took its toll on the elderly, especially unvaccinated people, overwhelming hospitals that had not been sufficiently prepared.
Despite severe travel restrictions and social distancing rules, Hong Kong, one of the most densely populated regions in the world, has recorded one of the highest per capita death rates from the virus on the planet, with nearly 10,000 deaths for 7.4 million inhabitants.
Hong Kong’s approach contrasts sharply with that of major rival financial centers, such as London, Singapore, New York and Tokyo, which reopened this year.
Around four million people are expected to visit Singapore this year.