NOA Episode 4 Singapore’s Response to Coronavirus: The ‘Golden Standard’
Interviewer(s): Phoebe Lai
Interviewee: Dr Anita Soosay
This is a snapshot of Singapore’s situation from An Insider’s Perspective.
Singapore was actually one of the first countries to be hit with the coronavirus and has been portrayed as the poster child at the beginning. Could you perhaps tell us more about what Singapore did well at the start to prevent a huge wave of cases?
When you look at the global picture, everybody talks about doing the ‘Testing, Tracing and Isolating’ and I think this is something that Singapore did very well from the start. By conducting intense contact tracing, they were able to keep the numbers low, because what follows after contact tracing is a good isolation of the people who had been traced; and they were put into quarantine for 14 days to make sure that they did not mix with the community.
However, the results show for itself. Whilst Singapore only recorded cases in the double digits at the start, a few weeks later, when we thought things were all being handled well, there was a huge spike in cases around mid-April; particularly in the migrant worker community. Where do you think things went wrong?
Looking back, it was definitely something that was kind of overlooked by many. I think, for us in Singapore, the hospitals really stepped up, the schools really stepped up, but I think when it came to the migrant community, the Ministry of Manpower left it to the dorm operators and the employers to make sure that they educate their employees - the migrant workers - on safe distancing and washing their hands. But sometimes that’s not enough, you know? When you’re living in a dorm with 5000 people in it, or sometimes even up to 15000, just being in such close proximity is just impossible to have that social distance. If you’re having communal meals, if you’re washing your dishes using the same big sink, you know it’s something that now, in hindsight, it’s just a bad idea especially when you have something like an infectious disease to deal with.
On the medical side of things, could you maybe tell us more about your sister who’s a doctor in Singapore as well? Could you tell us more about the morale of healthcare workers? How are they feeling: are they feeling optimistic?
Generally, I would say yes, they are optimistic. I think everyone just feels that it’s a job that needs to be done and they just want to do it well and make sure the patients recover. And while they are in hospital, they are given the best care that can be given to them. We generally have- I have never heard of any hospitals saying that they are short of any PPE, protective equipment; so I think we’re doing okay. The healthcare workers in Singapore are generally still fine.
In comparison to Singapore’s approach, which perhaps is slightly different because we kind of trickled in measures to ease the country into a so-called ‘circuit breaker’ which, if you look at the policies, is very similar to what New Zealand has called a lockdown. Do you think this different approach has contributed to Singapore being unable to curb community cases?
It’s quite difficult to say because every country is different. And maybe in hindsight, we will find out that a strong lockdown is actually a good idea, but the economy of New Zealand and Singapore is very different. You never know, a strong lockdown in Singapore might have devastated our economy. So, it’s really having to get that balance right: economy versus disease control. Now that New Zealand has opened up, we will get to see if they manage to keep their infection rate down. But the story hasn’t ended yet so we will need to wait for 2-3 weeks to really get a better picture. And maybe 6 months down the road when you look back, you will be able to tell which country got it right. But at the moment, it’s a bit early to say.
I’ve read just a couple of hours ago that Singapore has apparently launched an app called OneService, and they’ve recently added a new feature essentially for residents and users of the app to kind of ‘snitch’ and kind of report people who break and flout circuit breaker rules. Have you personally used the app and what are your thoughts on this?
No, I haven’t used the app. (Laughs) But I think I’m one of those people who follow the rules so I’m afraid of being snitched on so I just stay at home and try to not stir any problems.
Because we’re not having a really full lockdown, we haven’t brought out the army, we haven’t brought out the police, one way to get the community involved is to have something like this. I would prefer to have something like this, to have neighbourhood snitches than the army outside my home telling me I cannot drive more than 1 km or 10 kilometres. So every country deals with it differently. What this coronavirus has taught us is that every country deals with it in a way that suits their community, that suits their people; their government does what it thinks it’s best.
What do you think are some lessons that we can learn from this experience and where does Singapore really go from here?
I think what we can learn is what we’ve done well really works. We understand that contact tracing and isolation are important and we really need to do that from the start. We have a dedicated infectious disease centre, the National Centre of Infectious Diseases (NCID) and we can give good care to these patients to make sure that our fatality rate is low. We also did a quick implementation of the community care facilities which can house thousands of infectious patients without them having to burden the tertiary care hospitals, and also having a good stockpile of personal protection equipment (PPE). Those are positive lessons that Singapore can proudly say that they did well.
In terms of what they could have done better, I think wearing masks could have been implemented a bit earlier. This might have reduced a bit of that initial community spread around March, early-April sort of period. While I think Singapore is trying its best to contain the virus and we all need to make sure as a community and as a country, we need to do our part to stay at home as much as we can and to really sit this out.
Editor: Angela Zhou
Transcriptor: Phoebe Lai