This month started with the Pchum Ben holiday, this is one of the longest and most important holidays in Cambodia. Technically, it’s a 15 day long series of ceremonies honoring deceased ancestors but the core is an official week long holiday when Cambodians travel back to their ancestral homelands and pay tribute to their ancestors there. There was significant concern that all of the traveling around Pchum Ben would result in another large scale COVID-19 outbreak. Now that Cambodia has pass Pchum Ben the royal government has made a series of announcements related to easing COVID-19 restrictions.

As I’ve noted before, Cambodia is one of the most highly vaccinated countries in the world. This is largely due to mass vaccine donations from China.

Primary and Secondary schools will be fully reopening on November 1st, 2021. Cambodia has had an effective vaccination campaign for 6 to 11 year olds. The medical community is only beginning to study the long term effects of COVID-19 on children but it does seem that there’s risk to them despite them not having secere illness. So we think this is a reassuring step to protect the youth and, of course, it helps prevent spread from children to more vulnerable groups (like the elderly or immunocompromised). We are especially mindful of this given some of our elderly staff and that one of our staff has an immunocompromised child with disabilities. The vaccine being used is Sinovac, which is a ‘traditional’ or ‘inactivated viral’ vaccine. Sinovac is not as effective at preventing COVID-19 as the mRNA vaccines (e.g. Pfizer, Moderna, Astra Zeneca, etc) but it is effective at preventing severe cases of COVID-19 and the storage/transportation requirements are far less extreme. The American equivalent would be the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

After consulting with medical professionals, including MCC’s International Health Coordinator, we decided to have Charlotte join the hundreds of thousands of Cambodian youth who had already been vaccinated with Sinovac. She received her doses at the National Pediatric Hospital and ended up being on Cambodia’s BTV news.

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Cambodia is also easing entry requirements and resuming issuance of the Tourist visa. I wouldn’t recommend booking a ticket to visit just yet as there’s still some confusion over the new requirements and I think it’s good to give the government Ministries a month or so to align their policies. There’s also still mandatory government quarantine on arrival but it has been shortened for fully vaccinated visitors.

• Fully Vaccinated Diplomats, Government Officials, Investors, and Experts: 3 Days Mandatory Quarantine
• Fully Vaccinated Visitors: 7 Days Mandatory Quarantine
• Unvaccinated Visitors: 14 Days Mandatory Quarantine

As I shared previously, the quarantine facilities are…not the best…so while it’s good that the time has been reduced we’re still hoping that they’ll introduce personal quarantines for fully vaccinated visitors in the near future (e.g. quarantine at your guesthouse or apartment of choice instead of a government managed location). We’re not expecting that there will be a rush of tourists while mandatory quarantine is still in place so, if you’re willing to suffer through quarantine, you probably can experience a far less crowded Angkor Wat.

We, again, feel blessed to be in Cambodia during the pandemic. It was not something that we expected but the vaccination campaign and living in a population that has experienced previous SARS outbreaks has lead to a very different pandemic experience than in other contexts. Five of our national staff have already received their first booster shot. Please continue to pray for other MCC country programs, like Indonesia, which currently have staff infected with COVID-19 and no path to vaccinations in the near future.