Macau’s last known Covid-19 patient has recovered and been discharged from the hospital, boosting hopes that China will reopen its borders soon and travel to the casino hub can start to climb back to normal levels.
Health Bureau Director Lei Chin Ion said the government had successfully completed its mission of “zero deaths and zero infections in hospital” after a spike in new infections was detected back in March.
To date, only 45 cases of the potentially deadly virus have been confirmed in the city of 600,000, and it’s been over a month since the last new infection was diagnosed.
Yet, the city remains all but sealed off from the world, as it has been since late January, when the central government in Beijing and authorities in Macau and Hong Kong moved quickly to close their respective borders and quarantine travelers to contain the spread of the contagion, which is believed to have originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
In the meantime, Macau’s tourism-dependent economy and the casino industry that drives it are waiting anxiously for the central government to resume issuing visas for individual and group travel from the mainland.
The city depends on China for around 70 percent of its visitation, which last year topped 39 million an average of 108,000 arrivals a day.
Since the virus hit, visits are down more than 70 percent. Border crossings have slowed to roughly 35,000 a day, about half of which has been travel by local residents.
Concomitantly, the city’s world-leading casino revenues, US$36.4 billion last year, plunged more than 60 percent in the first quarter and were down in April by nearly 97 percent from April 2019.
