Asia Pacific travel bubbles and the COVID-19 'diseasescape'

Authors: Yuk Wah Chan, CityU and David Haines, George Mason University COVID-19 has made life more sedentary for people around the world. In addition to local lockdowns and social distancing, international border crossings ground to a near halt as global tourism tumbled. International arrivals declined by almost 75 per cent last year, from 1.5 billion in 2019 to just 381 million in 2020. Before the pandemic, one could hardly ever have imagined a radical reduction in international human movement in an age of hyper-globalisation. The effect of COVID-19 on international mobility can be characterised as a ' diseasescape ' where…