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Time to fight COVID-19 harder, Singapore

At home, especially in the heartland areas, Singaporeans are feeling jittery, especially parents with young children. 

Suresh Somu (The Jakarta Post)
Singapore
Sat, July 10, 2021

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Time to fight COVID-19 harder, Singapore

I

t’s like fighting a prolonged, almost never-ending, medical battle and Singapore has shown the proverbial blood, sweat and tears in trying to stay ahead of this — even if it means just a flicker of light at the end of the long COVID-19 tunnel.

And in the months to come, as COVID-19 vaccines are rolled out across the world, a number of drugs are being tested as treatment for people who already have the disease. There are no foolproof solutions as many of these are existing drugs that are being trialed against the virus.

Even in the United Kingdom, the world’s largest clinical trial called Recovery involves more than 12,000 patients. It is one of the few trials to have given a definitive view on which drugs do and do not work. The World Health Organization is running the Solidarity trial to assess promising treatments in countries around the world, and even the University of Oxford's Principle trial is looking for medicines that could help people recover from COVID-19 symptoms at home.

Scores of global pharmaceutical companies are also running trials of their own drugs that followed. The path to post-pandemic normality looked to be fairly smooth, with community cases generally running to no more than a few a day. 

Plans for events, which hadn’t been possible for months, have started, slowly but surely, to gather pace. This was in spite of the pandemic continuing to rage worldwide, with a number of countries forced to introduce and then reintroduce measures to curb the spread of the raging virus.

No one should ever give up in this extraordinary battle and if there is one country that seemed to spar well with the invisible pandemic assassin, it is the little city-state Singapore. For months, it had the mantra to keep the community cases to almost zero. Globally, it drew several accolades, to an extent where it began exploring travel bubble options with countries of the same stature. 

But every 1,440 minutes every day is unpredictable, and most times, it goes on in a tailspin when the bubble burst with multiple clusters. Oh dear, you may say. But the COVID-19 assassin is back, stronger, with a number of unlinked cases reported.

One of the most recent announcements is for the younger schooling generation with the implementation of full home-based learning amid a sharp spike in COVID-19 cases in the community.

Singapore Education Minister Chan Chun Seng now has an arduous task ahead of him. He said some of the new mutations of the coronavirus are “much more virulent” and “seem to attack the younger children”. The Delta strain appears to affect children more, further added Health Minister Ong Ye Kung. 

At home, especially in the heartland areas, citizens are feeling jittery, especially parents with young children. One parent, Linda Yang, a full-time working mother of two children, said the recent announcement about the Delta variant attacking young children was very worrying.

“I am seriously contemplating not sending my children to full-day child-care. Yes, we will have difficulties and need to make immediate adjustments as either one of us [she and her husband] have to be home. But ignorance is not bliss, and I don’t want to live with guilt.”

Business owners are seeing red, too. Recently, higher-risk settings such as gyms and mass participation events were suspended to minimize large COVID-19 clusters. This was followed by another rule where the government imposed restrictions on social activities and prohibition of dining in.

Dismayed restaurant owner Steven Goh said: “I really thought this is over for us, especially when we were back to our normal business. But now, only God knows. Most of my customers dine in because of the ambiance and the setting. Now, with takeaway, my revenue will be impacted greatly, by at least 70 percent. I really don’t know if I can bite the bullet again.”

Like most Asian countries, in order to tackle the spike, Singapore continues to announce some tighter, targeted measures. Places that were considered high-risk, such as indoor gyms and fitness studios, were instructed to close unless they offered low-intensity activities, while fewer people would be allowed at attractions, public libraries, funerals and meetings, incentives, conferencing, exhibitions (MICE) events. 

Among other initiatives, sizes of group gatherings were further reduced from five to two people, with dining-in at food and beverage establishments banned. Working from home is also to be the default at workplaces.

As the COVID-19 situation continues to evolve globally, infectious disease experts say that targeted sectorial measures, such as the ones introduced by Singapore, are set to be the way forward.

“Sectoral lockdowns in a targeted fashion [are] likely the way to go, but the thing is that the decision to do that must be quick and fast,” said Ling Li Min, an infectious disease specialist at Rophi Clinic.

She noted that such an approach requires that community cases are not widespread.

“When countries embark on these targeted measures, it is probably at a point in time whereby they feel that they can still control it, meaning that community cases are not widespread, it's only small clusters here and there,” she explained. 

“Early on, you can't keep waiting for the cases to increase, and that can only happen when the community cases overall are still low. If there are a lot of community cases, then your sectoral lockdown isn’t going to work.”

For such measures to bear fruit, the rest of the community must be “clued in”, Ling said.

“The testing, the tracing, isolation must be superb and robust. Some of these countries don't quite have that — they're not as swift with that.”

Paul Tambyah, an infectious diseases expert and president of the Asia Pacific Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infection, emphasizes that these sectoral measures are likely to remain in place until vaccination rates reach higher levels.

As Singapore is one of the world’s most globally connected cities, it is likely to need “far higher” levels of vaccination to protect the population than other more "closed or isolated" societies such as Israel or New Zealand, added Tambyah.

At the end of the day, this prolonged medical battle must be fought on, irrespective of the consequences, and Singapore has shown the proverbial blood, sweat and tears in trying to stay ahead of this even if it means just a flicker of light at the end of the long COVID-19 tunnel.

 ***

The writer is a journalist based in Singapore

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