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I describe Singapore as Asia that works and maybe this amazing city-state now gives some insights on what Australia may be like going forward,with this highly insightful AFR report by Emma Connors AFR South-East Asia correspondent giving us an interesting insight saying: –

The temperature screening points that have loomed large at every office block, shopping mall and many restaurants and bars in Singapore are losing their power. For a year and a half, these machines have ruled lives. Often you were required to dip your forehead to get the sensor to work, which felt like a weird sort of obeisance to the pandemic gods.

A deserted street in Singapore’s Chinatown area this week. Bloomberg.

And, always, the shot of anxiety as you waited for the light to flash green. What would happen if you didn’t get the electronic OK? Would you just be refused entry? Or would a pack of PPE-clad workers suddenly appear and take your too-hot body away?

But no more. As part of the new regime, temperature screening will no longer be required. The exposure alerts that warned if you had been near someone who had since tested positive for COVID-19 have also gone quiet, removed from the mandatory app.

This week Singapore passed the 70 per cent vaccination mark, and the island nation is expected to hit 80 per cent by the end of the month. This, everyone most earnestly hopes, is the beginning of a new era, that of a COVID-19-resilient nation opening up to the world.

Many of the details are still to be worked out. Is there a simpler way to check on international vaccinations than a blood test, for example? What to do when the next variant, possibly even more contagious than delta, comes along? How to manage regional relations when neighbouring countries are still overwhelmed?

No longer mandatory: temperature checks in Singapore.  Bloomberg.

The government is working on the answers and not every solution is to everyone’s liking. There will inevitably be setbacks. Still, after months of on-again, off-again restrictions, there is a sense the small city-state with a population just larger than Sydney’s is finally moving on. And it’s doing so by following the philosophy espoused by China’s Deng Xiaoping.

Slow and steady

A ‘feeling the stones’ approach to ‘crossing the river’ from closed to open economic and societal states is a prudent approach, says Devadas Krishnadas, who held fiscal and policy development roles in government before founding a management consulting firm. It’s an approach Singapore has deployed successfully in the past, he says.

“Generally, in high risk and highly uncertain areas, such as alternative energy or water reclamation, the government has taken a step-by-step approach,” he says. It typically starts by investing in research and development, then trying small-scale pilots to prove concepts and then, finally, advancing to full-scale and expensive projects.

“This is the approach we took with our floating solar farms and our water reclamation.” It worked, with the two innovations now “mainstreamed into our power grid and our water supply chain respectively”.

The government is rolling out various preventative and care measures as it seeks to mainstream its approach to COVID-19 as an endemic disease. This can, the government hopes, be managed in a way that permits travel and where there is no need for blunt approaches to infection control such as lockdowns, mass temperature screening and broadcast alerts to anyone who may have been within cooee of a case.

COVID-19 has not been eradicated in Singapore. In the past week, there have been 543 new cases. As of Thursday, there were 470 active cases in hospital. Most are asymptomatic, but 36 are seriously ill and requiring oxygen, while nine are in intensive care.

It’s clear that vaccination sometimes fails. As most now realise, vaccinated people can still become infected and infect others. The difference is the vaccinated tend not to get seriously ill. In the last four weeks, 8.7 per cent of those in Singapore who caught the SARS-Cov-2 virus that causes COVID-19 and were unvaccinated became severely ill. This dropped to 0.9 per cent of the fully vaccinated who became infected.

Hesitancy

In a carrot-and-stick approach to overcoming vaccine hesitancy, groups of up to five who are fully jabbed can now dine and mix freely. However, the government has not taken up the suggestion of a former diplomat, Ambassador-at-Large Tommy Koh, who wrote on Facebook that unvaccinated people should be barred from not just restaurants but also supermarkets, markets, concerts, weddings, sports events and even places of religious worship. You can still get a table if you are unvaccinated but can produce a recent negative test and there is no vaccination requirement for couples at coffee shops and hawker markets.

Anywhere else, though, waiters won’t hand over a menu – or even take a coffee order – until you’ve produced the app with proof you’re at least two weeks past what the World Health Organisation requires for any of the vaccines included on its emergency health use authorisation.

For foreigners with work visas, there is also good news – as long as they’re vaccinated. Some who normally reside in Singapore were stuck outside for weeks when the drawbridge was raised during delta outbreaks in recent months. Entry applications began to get approved again this week, while the processing of new applications will be held up until the backlog has cleared.

Those keen to apply for employment passes typically used by white-collar professions shouldn’t bother, though, unless they are fully jabbed – and don’t mind proving it with a blood test. Serology tests will be mandatory once quarantine is over. That result will enable individuals to register as vaccinated with the National Immunisation Registry and start booking restaurants freely.

Singapore’s cautious opening up comes as other south-east Asian nations struggle to get vaccinations to the point where the rate of severe infection abates. In nearby Malaysia, just under 30 per cent of the population is fully vaccinated, a rapid increase from just under 10 per cent a month ago. The nation is still in the eye of the delta storm, with more than 200,000 active cases and hundreds of deaths each day.

It takes individual stories to give an idea of the extent of personal loss. The death on Monday of popular Malaysian singer Siti Sarah, who was eight months pregnant when she became ill, is one such tragedy. Husband Shahmira Muhammad said he didn’t take his wife, carrying their third child, to the hospital fast enough. When he did, they were at first refused entry. Her condition deteriorated after she was finally admitted. She gave birth by caesarean section after she was put in an induced coma. Three days later she died.

Siti Sarah was not vaccinated. “COVID-19 is real.” Shahmira said in a video posted on Facebook. “I used to be one of those who didn’t believe in COVID-19, but then it happened to me.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Malaysia has also signalled it is ready, like Singapore, to allow some vaccinated travellers to swap hotel quarantine with stay-at-home notices. The measure will apply to those coming from Singapore. The city-state is unlikely to reciprocate any time soon. For now, its limited relaxation for work pass holders will extend only to eight of the countries it judges to be lower in risk: Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, Italy, Norway, South Korea and Switzerland.

Singapore has signalled it hopes to allow more international travel from next month. Pre-pandemic, many Singaporeans thought nothing of travelling elsewhere in Asia, the Pacific or even to Europe for a long weekend. This week a survey found 44 per cent of Singaporeans plan to travel in the next three months, up from 20 per cent a month ago.

What happens next is all up to the virus that is busy replicating itself in millions of people across the world and throwing up new variants as it goes. Singapore’s cautious approach to opening up could be thrown into reverse if the virus once again got the upper hand. Such a scenario could arise if vaccines proved to be ineffective against a new strain.

Gabriel Lim, permanent secretary of Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry, told reporters this week that the government is carefully monitoring infection rates in nations that have already opened up. On the plus side, the UK appears to have stabilised. On the other hand, the situation in Israel is not “quite as benign”.

“We are treating the virus with the utmost respect,” Mr Lim said. “It has proven to be quite wily and quite formidable.”

An edited report from Emma Connors AFR South-East Asia correspondent, by John Alwyn-Jones, Special Correspondent Travel and Tourism, Global Travel Media