Singapore is aiming for a feat no country has achieved so far: reopen to the world and emerge from the pandemic with a death toll still in the double digits.
While the U.S. and U.K. have plowed headlong into reopening their economies, their failure to contain the virus early on resulted in hundreds of thousands of fatalities. Vaccine hesitancy is also providing a reality check for strategies that treated inoculation as the magic bullet. At the other end of the spectrum, places like Australia and New Zealand managed to avoid the pathogen almost entirely, but slow progress with shots means they’re unable to lift the border controls and quarantines that keep them isolated.
Singapore is seeking to succeed at both. In a plan laid out by officials this week, the tiny city-state that relies on being globally connected is eyeing the resumption of some international travel by September. To do that, it’s trying to snuff out an outbreak driven by the delta variant and reach a vaccination level — 80% — that few countries have achieved, but which the government says will put Singapore in a position where it can live with the virus without carnage.
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