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View all search resultsTime to fight COVID-19 harder, Singapore
At home, especially in the heartland areas, Singaporeans are feeling jittery, especially parents with young children.
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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.
