Responding to a sudden increase in the number of coronavirus infections, the Macau government has imposed a sweeping ban on all foreign visitors and non-resident workers with the exception of Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwanese nationals.
Infections in the city of 600,000 appeared to peak early in February. But the last week or so has seen a spike in new cases to 16, four of them non-resident workers.
“Several thousand students who are studying abroad might come back to Macau, and we have to concentrate our medical resources on them,” said Health Bureau Director Lei Chin Ion, explaining the ban.
The exemption for nationals from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan does not free them from having to undergo six to eight hours of medical observation after arriving, if necessary enduring a period of quarantine. Those visitors are responsible for any related medical expenses.
As it stands, few of them are entering Macau to begin with, as the Chinese government suspended tour group travel back in January and stopped issuing individual visitor visas. According to reports, however, some mainland residents are still able to get exit visas to Macau under certain circumstances, for business or family purposes, for example.
Macau residents returning from greater China won’t be quarantined, but health officials may send residents returning from high-risk areas to two designated non-gaming hotels for medical observation. They may also elect to stay home to self-quarantine for two weeks. The list of high-risk areas
now includes Australia, the United States, Canada, Brazil, South Korea, Japan, Iran, Egypt and large parts of Western Europe.
In the case of non-resident workers arriving from outside greater China, exemptions might be permitted in “exceptional cases,” the government said, if the situation involves either disease prevention, emergency rescue or other purposes that serve the city’s “normal operation” and “residents’ basic living needs.”
No doubt the ban on tourism from China has helped protect Macau from a far worse outbreak of the virus, but the effect on the city’s principal industry has been catastrophic.
Revenue in the world’s largest casino market plunged year-on-year by nearly 88 percent in February, a month that also saw a government-imposed shutdown that lasted more than two weeks. Analysts expect much the same in March, with revenues currently on track to decline by around 80 percent.
Depending on when normal travel from the mainland resumes, the market could see a gaming revenue decline in a worst-case scenario of “well over” 40 percent for the year, according to brokerage Sanford Bernstein, or by only around 15 percent in a more optimistic scenario in which visa clearances resume in the second quarter, air traffic returns to normal levels, and the Chinese economy recovers.
The latter may not be as far-fetched as it seems at this point, according to brokerage Nomura Instinet, whose analysts say their conversations with casino operators indicate a possible resumption of individual visitor visas “within two months.”
“While the (Chinese) government is still shutting access from stricken countries in Europe and Asia,” the outlook in Macau and the neighboring mainland province of Guangdong “could encourage gradual resumption of (individual visitor visa) issuance,” the firm stated in a report issued prior to the recent increase in virus infections.
The report concluded on a hopeful note:
“More than any other market and sector in the near term, we believe that the demand recovery in Macau, depending on the pace and breadth of border reopenings, has the potential to be steeper than a recovery in global corporate travel.”
