March 14, 2022: -Singapore wants to eventually allow all travelers to skip quarantine in the country as they are vaccinated, Transport Minister S. Iswaran said.

On Thursday, in an interview with CNBC, he said, “With greater vaccination and boosting of populations, and also better testing and safe management protocols, I think we have now been able to put in place a series of measures to restart travel.”

That has meant a steady build-up of so-called vaccinated travel lanes, Iswaran said. Singapore established these lanes with certain countries that allow vaccinated travelers to visit without serving quarantine.

“We do want to pivot as long as the travelers are vaccinated and can prove that, they should be able to enter the country without quarantine,” Iswaran said.

In the previous year, Singapore’s passenger traffic was at about 15% of pre-Covid volume, and the city-state wants to “build on that momentum,” he added.

Singapore previously said to ease restrictions after its current omicron wave peaks. This year, it has seen local infections rising to over 20,000 cases per day, but that has fallen to more than 10,000 a day in recent weeks.

“I think as a small open economy, we’re always hugely exposed to exogenous impact,” he said, responding to a question on how vulnerable the city-state is to recession.

“And so in this instance, the impact to these increases in the price of energy is something that will cut through the whole economy,” he added.

Oil prices have spiked since Russia invaded Ukraine as concerns increase over the already-tight supply. The U.S. banned Russian energy imports, and the U.K. and European Union also said they would phase out its fossil imports.

Russia is the world’s third-largest oil producer after the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. It’s also the biggest exporter of crude oil to global markets and the top supplier of natural gas to the European Union, about 43%.

However, crude prices fell over 10% on the back of indications that the U.S. might have boosted oil production from other sources. U.S. crude and international benchmark Brent are still up over 20% since the beginning of February.

Analysts warn that a sustained spike in energy prices would send inflation soaring, hitting consumer wallets.

Iswaran told CNBC that Singapore had accelerated its timeframe for transitioning to greener transport, like making charging infrastructure for electric vehicles widely available by 2025. But he indicated that initiative is separate from increasing energy prices.