levels in Dec-20. Mercifully, global mortality risk has fallen substantially (weekly mortality in Dec-21: 7,093/d, -37% oya). This edition reviews Omicron developments in Asia and key epidemiology data to understand whether Asia can maintain the partial reopening status ahead of Lunar New Year. We also update 2022's vaccination and related public policies in Asia (including the unvaccinated population) following more datapoints on vaccine efficacy/safety. Lastly, we revisit public mobility related matters, including border re-opening schedules.

 What is Asia’s dominant variant for now? Whilst Omicron is growing in the EU/US/UK (9%/16%/30% of total in Dec-21, link), the Delta variant still dominated 95% of Asia’s total new cases in Dec-21. We summarise Asia new cases by country and variant in Table 1. We think Asia’s conservative border control, local mobility control, and large public acceptance of wearing masks supported a milder winter curve in December (daily new cases: 47k/d, -9% oya), although Asia’s estimated R0 has marginally rebounded to above 1 for the last two consecutive weeks (R0: 1.07, +0.02 w/w). In the likely scenario that existing public mobility/international border controls remain in place over the next 4-6 weeks, we expect 'Delta’ to remain the dominant variant in Asia, continuing the milder curve potential in 1Q22. We also update Asia's mortality/hospitalisation data (Table 2). Since the large population vaccination program in 2H21, favourable mortality risk trends appear unlikely to push up 'excess deaths' in the system. We forecast Asia's case fatality risk (=direct death/ new cases) falling below 1% in 2022. Page 6 updates Asia curve model trends.

 2022 vaccination programme: How to build public consensus? Global infection data indicates little change in new cases of infection between Dec-20 (vaccination: 0.1%) and Dec-21 (vaccination: 58%). Arguably, the wide spread of the new variant Omicron in Europe & North America, re-opening, and seemingly shorter protection period post vaccination all contributed to this less positive outcome. More importantly, besides immunity wane risk, we observe growing debates on vaccine efficacy (high reinfection risk among vaccinated population)/ safety (side effects), based on 2021 data (Table 3). Thus, we think that public policy on vaccination programmes/vaccine mandates, as well as unvaccinated population related matters (Table 6), may be challenged in 2022.

 Border re-opening. Following larger new cases in highly vaccinated developed countries, we are inclined to be more conservative on Asia’s border re-opening schedule by 1Q22-end. We update each Asia region’s public mobility related matters (vaccine passport, mandate trace app, etc.) in Table 8. We also anticipate potential delays on initial border re-opening scale (daily quota: 1000) / schedule (end of Jan-22) between Mainland China and HK SAR.