Two COVID tests, five-day quarantine, limited expense account abuse opportunities: Taiwan sets new rules for business travel

Visits to your favorite electronics supplier are not going to be fast or fun

Taiwan has floated new rules for business travel that will make rapid dashes to chat with your preferred electronics suppliers even less fun.

Explained yesterday by the nation’s Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC), the new regime for business trips looks like this: ul>

• Test negative to COVID-19 before you arrive in Taiwan;
• Endure five days of quarantine once you land;
• Pay for another COVID-19 test, and have it come back negative, before being allowed out of quarantine;
• If you pass the second test, for the next 21 days you’ll have to “minimize time spent in public, wear a surgical mask, check body temperature twice daily and report any suspected symptoms to the CECC.”

In other words, forget the fun bits of business travel, namely expense-account-powered gluttony and boozing. Forget Taipei’s marvelous night markets, too.

Brace yourself for an inability to use jetlag-avoidance tactics like going outside for a walk.

And stand by, too, for the list of nations from which Taiwan is willing to admit travelers.

The Register now rates the prospect of attending the rescheduled-for-September COMPUTEX tech-fest as entirely improbable.

Other South-East-Asian nations that play a part in the tech world are also opening up. Vietnam yesterday suggested it could allow flights from locales that have gone 30 days without community transmission of COVID-19 and named Guangzhou, Chinese Taipei, Seoul and Tokyo as potential sources of inbound travelers. Singapore is edging towards resumption of live events and the Canalys forum has moved there from the Philippines.

Inbound flyers headed to Vietnam will find discos and karaoke bars have re-opened when they land. We’ll leave readers to decide if that’s a good thing or not. ®