Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, responding to appeals from frontline medical workers battling Covid-19, has ordered a Modified Enhanced Community Quarantine (MECQ), the second-strictest designation, to be implemented from August 4 to 18.
Duterte had only recently ordered the General Community Quarantine (GCQ) to be extended to August 15, but this was judged to be insufficient in light of the grave status of the pandemic.
Under the MECQ, the population is expected to stay at home, and any gatherings that do occur are limited to five people. Most public transportation is shut down, and even the government is meant to employ only a “skeleton workforce.”
On Sunday, the Department of Health reported more than 5,000 new Covid-19 cases, a single-day record, bringing the country’s total cases above 103,000. The death toll is now in excess of 2,000 people.
The Philippines government has decided to keep the current quarantine restrictions in Metro Manila in place and expanded the curbs to neighboring Bulacan, Rizal, Laguna and Cavite provinces for 14 days in a bid to suppress a surge in coronavirus infections.
Kintetsu Group Holdings is reportedly close to abandoning its earlier plans to extend its rail line to Yumeshima before the 2025 World Expo. The firm is concerned that there may be little passenger demand with lingering uncertainty over the pandemic and the future of IR development in Osaka.
In this April edition of Asia Gaming Briefings we take the pulse of how the North Asia jurisdictions of Japan, Korea and the Russian Far East have fared.
The world is bouncing back, or at least coming to grips with the fact that going forward not much will be the same as before. Commendably, this industry quickly understood the need to adapt to a new normal, and that the days of targeting the low hanging fruit of the VIP sector are gone.
Over the years, many of the answers have been remarkably prescient in their forecasts for the near-term direction of Asia’s gaming industry. However, we can safely say that no one came anywhere close to guessing what 2020 may have had in store.
