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Thailand: Value of border closures is falling as costs rise
The only countries in Southeast Asia that have started opening their international borders to non-essential travel in a significant way are Singapore and Thailand, although Cambodia may soon do so too. Singapore has opened up to more than 10 countries with low coronavirus infection and high vaccination rates, most of which have reciprocated. But the share of the population that is fully vaccinated in Singapore and Cambodia is around 80%, while Thailand’s rate is just above one-third.
Thailand plans to open more parts of the country to vaccinated international tourists on Nov 1. There are growing concerns that this may jeopardise domestic health conditions. A recent poll by Suan Dusit Rajabhat University found that most Thais are against reopening the country because they fear tourists will bring in new infections and that this was the wrong time to do so. Are these fears justified, and should Thailand wait to reach herd immunity before opening its borders?
The fact that the highly transmissible Delta variant has become dominant in Thailand suggests that international border openings are unlikely to be the main driver of future infections or how the pandemic evolves.
Delta’s high transmissibility is eroding the health-protective effects of border closures relative to domestic mobility restrictions, while the economic cost of border closures continues to accelerate, especially in heavily tourist-dependent countries like Thailand.
In short, if it is considered relatively safe to reduce domestic mobility restrictions, then the same principle should apply to international borders as well, since more safety protocols are in place for cross-border versus domestic movement.
This has been the experience in Phuket and Koh Samui, which have employed the sandbox or “micro herd immunity” approach to open up unilaterally to a large number of countries. There have been no community outbreaks linked to international arrivals, although Phuket had to ban domestic arrivals after a surge in domestically imported cases. This demonstrates the heightened risks of domestic versus international travel in the age of Delta.
It should also not be surprising that it is domestic tourism that has been riskier in a country still battling a local outbreak, and when testing and other protocols are more stringent for international compared to domestic tourists.
Ideally, reaching herd immunity through vaccination should precede opening up more broadly to vaccinated travellers because they still carry some risk of infection, albeit a much lower risk of developing severe symptoms. Therefore, opening up to vaccinated travellers reduces the risk of them adding strains to the healthcare system but, without herd immunity, the local community is not fully protected.
What explains the seemingly contradictory behaviour of reducing international and domestic mobility restrictions before reaching herd immunity? It is a combination of lockdown fatigue and the need to balance health and the economy, especially in a tourism-dependent economy with dwindling fiscal space.
But once the balance between health and economy is struck, there are different combinations of domestic and border restrictions that can produce the desired economic outcomes.
So far, most of the actions to support the economy have focused on easing domestic restrictions. Border restrictions have hardly featured in the calculus, except for the sandboxes. Because borders have been mostly closed, the economic imperative has required so much domestic easing that health risks have risen sharply, as evidenced by soaring infection rates. If this lopsided approach was suboptimal before, it is becoming unsustainable with the Delta outbreak.
Border measures carry a premium only while they keep new variants out. Once they fail, as they inevitably have, their value diminishes rapidly. They fail for two reasons. First, borders are never completely closed, by design, because it would be both impractical and unsustainable to do so.
Even those who have been the most vigilant about closing borders, countries like Australia and New Zealand, have chosen not to completely close despite having the advantage of geographic isolation.
Second, because borders are not completely shut, domestic safeguards need to be perfect but they are not. Domestic protocols can slip, as they have in Australia and New Zealand, leading to breakthrough infections during quarantine.
Travel bans are an attempt at completely closing the border to select countries and have been employed, unsuccessfully, with the emergence of each new variant. By the time they are instituted against countries where the new variant has been spreading, it is simply too late to stop them.
Travel bans could work if we could reduce the time taken to determine the risks carried by new variants, say from the genetic sequencing alone, but this is not yet possible. Until it is, border measures will not protect us from future variants but improved domestic protocols might. Therefore, keeping borders closed in the hope that it will protect us from the next variant is futile.
Now that the Delta variant has taken off in Southeast Asia, imported cases make up just a small fraction of total infections. It is small not because border measures are working but because they failed to keep out a highly transmissible variant that then spread rapidly domestically.
Once this happens, the value of border restrictions relative to domestic restrictions starts to fall sharply. This suggests that shifting the focus away from border restrictions, for any given health-economy trade-off, would be beneficial.
Such a shift would better address economic considerations without significantly compromising health conditions or the healthcare system. This is what Thailand is doing, and it is the right move.
Source: https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/2203583/value-of-border-closures-is-falling-as-costs-rise