China Eases Testing on Some Incoming Visitors

We track scheduled flights (what’s planned) and tracked flights (what took off) from a sample of the largest airports across the world.

Looking at data up to 6 March 2023:

• Global departures show no sign of slowing, now 1,000 ahead of 2019 levels (Chart 1).
• It is getting easier to visit China. Starting last week, 48-hour negative Covid-19 tests are no longer required when flying to China from local areas. Instead, they can replace 48-hour nucleic acid testing with antigen testing. Turning to the details, departures out of Asia have fallen 0.9% WoW.
• Elsewhere, departures fell a touch less from the US (-0.7% WoW), while they increased from Europe (+0.7% WoW) in what proved a relatively mild week.

Information on long-term movements in flight data is available below.

China

Japan

Hong Kong

South Korea

Singapore

Thailand

US

UK

Italy

Spain

Germany

France

Canada

Bilal Hafeez is the CEO and Head of Research at Macro Hive. He spent over twenty years doing research at big banks – JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and Nomura, where he had various “Global Head” roles and did FX, rates and cross-markets research.

Ben Ford is a Researcher at Macro Hive. Ben studied BSc Financial Mathematics at Cardiff University and MSc Finance at Cass Business School, his dissertations were on the tails of GARCH volatility models, and foreign exchange investment strategies during crises, respectively.

Photo Credit: depositphotos.com

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