Following the success of the Taiwan-Palau travel bubble, Taiwan's Tourism Bureau said it is actively negotiating with Vietnam, Guam, Hawaii, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore to set up similar travel bubbles, Taiwan News reported recently. Palau is an island country in the western Pacific.

Chang Hsi-chung, general director of the bureau, said tourism representatives from these destinations last week visited Taiwan to work on the travel bubble scheme.

Chang said the six countries and territories are actively negotiating the establishment of new tourism bubbles with Taiwan and would discuss the loosening of pandemic prevention regulations with the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC).

Travel bubbles, also known as travel corridors and corona corridors, are essentially an exclusive partnership between two or more countries/territories that have demonstrated considerable success in containing and combating the Covid-19 pandemic within their respective borders.

The country has been successful in containing its outbreaks with strict quarantine and tracking measures, having gone over a month without community transmissions. The government is also working on a 'vaccine passport' scheme to reopen its door to foreign tourists.

However, the Vietnamese government is calling for more vigilance against Covid-19 amid intensified outbreaks linked to new variants in neighboring countries like Cambodia, Laos and Thailand.

Taiwan has been widely applauded for its management of the pandemic, with one of the lowest per capita Covid-19 rates in the world, with 1,110 infections and 12 deaths so far.