Will ‘Green Lanes’ Bring Much Needed Sanity to Travel?

The Government of Singapore announced last week that talks are underway with South Korea and Australia to establish Green Lanes for global travel. Singapore is also having such discussions with New Zealand and Malaysia, while China on Friday became the first country to establish a Green Lane with the Republic. Singapore is actually in simultaneous discussions with "as many countries as possible" on forming Green Lanes, and such discussions are taking place on a bilateral level, not a multilateral one. The Green Lanes contemplated by Singapore for short term essential travel for business and official work are now being closely followed up by all nations globally as they seem to be charting out the roadmap to recovery from this abysmal financial gloom, where tourism and travel have been maximally hurt.

The proposed reciprocal Green Lane agreements mean there must be a mutual assurance of each other's test protocol and standards, say, health experts. A situation where there is no such trust and "everybody does their own thing", with each country insisting on testing travellers for the virus as well as giving them a 14-day quarantine, would be essentially unworkable. This is because aside from having to undergo two tests, travellers would have to be quarantined for almost an entire month in order to travel from one place to another. So for a Green Lane arrangement to work, both countries would have to first have confidence in each other's safeguards and be able to coordinate their quarantine orders, so that travellers might need to be tested or quarantined only once. Aside from discussing necessary protocols, there is also a need to look at the health situation in each country to see when these protocols can be safely deployed.

Also read: Health Passport

The Green Lane and the Health Passport are welcome initiatives for getting the world going again. 

Singapore economy is regarded as one of the most stable in the world. No foreign debts, high government revenue and a consistently positive surplus. The backbone of its economy is exporting in electronic manufacturing and machinery, financial services, tourism and it houses the world’s busiest cargo seaport. It has risen out of shadows of a being a British colony and being thrown out of Malaysia as an ‘unwanted headache’ to one of the most attractive destinations for the immigrant professional population. Singapore is a country touted as the proverbial ‘East meets West’ with a combination of Asian and European cultures, influenced by an eclectic mix of Malay, South Asian, East Asian, and Eurasian cultures. The country boasts of one of the most advanced and robust healthcare systems with an emphasis on research, innovation and excellence. As the adage goes, ‘God helps those who help themselves’, Singapore has decided not to mourn the economic losses or succumb to anarchy but get ahead with damage control and take the proverbial ‘bull by its horns’.

Singapore was one of the first countries to use the antibody test to track coronavirus infection for a patient in February, clueing up as a missing link between two clusters of cases that each occurred in a Church. The Grace Assembly of God Church, with two large houses of worship in the city-state; and another cluster of cases in the Life Church and Missions, a small evangelical congregation, apparently getting the visitors from Wuhan had a couple in common and regarded as the Index case. The husband tested positive by PCR and was hospitalised; while the wife tested PCR negative but the experimental antibodies test was positive. This is believed to be the first particular test in corona context to be used for contact tracing. The Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore developed the test and ever since the assays have been validated and are in production to be deployed widely. 

The molecular diagnostic testing for the viral genome is useful for the diagnosis, triaging patients, monitoring the spread of the disease, identifying strains and mutations, and testing the prevalence of the infection. The antibody or Serological tests are designed to show if you had the Covid-19, whether symptomatic or asymptomatic, now have protective immunity and the risk of infectiousness to others around you. Like infections with other pathogens, Sars-CoV-2 infection elicits IgG & IgM antibodies but they are a little unusual as they arise nearly simultaneously in serum within 2-3 weeks of the onset of the illness. Moreover, it is not certain how long these antibodies remain detectable or how many antibodies are required to be sure of immunity. These tests were being used to identify plasma donors for the severely affected patients and to predict the herd immunity in a community. While concrete research is still underway, the European Union and the Food and Drug Authority, FDA have given emergency approval to these tests to sift out people who can be sent back to work with minimum risk – ‘immunity passport’. Singapore has unveiled its rapid testing kits, called cPass, which were developed after trials on patients in China and the city-state, and get the results in under an hour. These claim to have very high sensitivity and specificity to the antibodies making them very reliable and results to be reproducible. 

As the testing criteria of Sars-CoV-2 are still to be universalised, Singapore decided to hold individual discussions and consensus on testing with each country and obviated the need of testing the individual twice and quarantining for mandatory 14 days twice, as mentioned earlier. This initiative will fast pace the essential travel needed to reignite the economy. It has successfully operationalised the Green Lane with China last month, with mutual concurrence on the health essentials, not just testing but the availability of world-class healthcare reciprocally in case of any eventuality, the availability and preparedness of green hotels, green cabs, green business centres, and more, with safety gear in place for the ease of business. If this experiment succeeds, it could be extended to revive international travel and tourism. As they say ‘where there is a will, there is a way…’. The futuristic approach, and strategic thinking, required for all this immense planning can be gauged from the fact that we, in India, and very many countries round the globe, are still combating the odds of successful inter-state travel. So Singapore’s initiative is indeed lion-hearted. 

We have over time seen travel restrictions being changed and updated constantly to connect the world and safeguard the people. From the mandatory Yellow Fever vaccine for travel to African and South American countries to do away with sharp objects in cabin baggage, to the not-so-long-ago imposed restrictions on the amount of liquid the passenger could carry onboard, we have adapted to each of them. So if this experiment by Singapore works, the other countries do not need to reinvent the wheel and can follow the recovery map, adapting it to suit their own individual health specifications.

Tolstoy said in Anna Karenina, “happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. The tsunami of Corona has wrecked havoc worldwide and each nation has its unique set of problems to combat. But the universal truth is that every nation needs to rekindle its economy and take bold drastic steps in that direction. For if there is a jingle in the pocket and food in the belly, there is the hope of better days! Work From Home (WFH) options are like wrapping the unborn in amniotic membranes, but then one day the baby has to be delivered and face the world. In the same vein, initiatives like Green Lanes will bring both hope and a practical way forward to a suffering world.