The Impact of Travel Restrictions in East Asia

As we saw in Part 1 of this series, Singapore was doing many things right, dancing nearly perfectly, but then workers from abroad seeded the country with coronavirus and kindled an outbreak. The lax travel restrictions seeded the disease, the lack of mask requirements spread the virus, and the lack of limits on social gathering size created super-spreader events. 

The country controlled seeds from China really well early on. As you can see, a few blue seeds in January were stopped after the ban on Chinese visitors. But it was then too slow stopping visitors from countries like Italy, France, Spain and Germany in the first half of March, and then the UK, the US, and other countries later. The result is that these few blue cases then created the outbreak (in pink) just after that.

Conversely, as we saw in Part 1, Taiwan was extremely on top of travel bans, updating them daily. The country banned travelers from Wuhan the day of the lockdowns, and all Chinese nationals two weeks later, on February 6th. On March 14th all European resident visitors had to quarantine for two weeks upon arrival. It was expanded to all visitors three days later, and by March 19th all non-resident foreigners were simply banned. As of April 18th, non-essential travel was forbidden and all incoming travelers must self-quarantine for 14 days. 

South Korea had a reverse ban. “Thanks” to their early epidemic, 171 countries banned travel to and from the country, which eliminated a lot of potential seeding.

Another country that has officially managed the crisis really well is Vietnam. It declared the situation an epidemic as early as February 1st, as soon as they discovered community spread. They stopped all flights from China. They then quickly banned flights from most countries. In fact, they were so fast that they closed the country to visitors from Spain, France, and the UK before those countries announced their lockdowns. As of April 18th, the country has 270 cases, in a population of 95 million.

This graph shows when different countries in East Asia took different travel restriction measures. Each country has a lane, and the colored lines show restrictions targeting different geographic areas: Hubei, China, South Korea, Northern Italy, Europe and the world. It’s difficult to really graph this, because there is an infinite number of measures that can be taken, from temperature checks to health declarations, regional travel restrictions, quarantines for certain visitors, exceptions for others… But we tried to simplify as much as possible taking what was closest to either a mandatory quarantine for all visitors from a certain area, or a full-on ban—despite frequent exemptions, such as diplomats or others.

In this graph, we can see when different countries from East Asia took different travel measures. Each line represents a restriction from a different area, from Hubei to the world. We can see that Taiwan and Vietnam, which both have fewer than 1,000 cases, tended to restrict travel from most other countries faster. 

Singapore was reasonably quick, but not quick enough to stop the seeds, mostly from Bangladesh and Indonesia. Luck also has a role: If Singapore hadn’t been so cosmopolitan, it might not have this outbreak. Thankfully, the amazing management of the country has already reduced the outbreak.

South Korea is a special case: Although it wasn’t always very fast restricting travel, it did restrict travel from China quickly. By the end of February, dozens of countries had already banned travel from South Korea, which also made it much harder for travelers to go to the country. This “reverse ban” surely helped the country.

Although Thailand was slower, it had some measures, such as temperature checks and health declarations. It might also have been lucky to prevent more seeding.

Japan was in general the slowest of them all, which likely explains the slow growth in cases through February and March, with the final outbreak at the end of March. Thankfully, the country has also reacted well and appears to be controlling the outbreak now. 

With all of this, we can see that the East Asian countries that restricted travel fastest were also in general the ones to have less seeding—and hence less spreading. 

The problem, obviously, is that travel bans are very expensive. For some countries, heavily dependent on tourism, it’s vital.

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