We’re officially one week away from Phase Three, and all of a sudden, things don’t look so goody now.

As of 12pm today (21 December 2020), the Ministry of Health (MOH) has preliminarily confirmed 10 new cases of COVID-19 infection.

9 of them are imported cases.

However, 1 of them is a community case. More details about the community case will be shared tonight instead.

This brings the total number of cases in Singapore to 58,432.

Based on yesterday’s figures, the number of new cases in the community has remained low, with no new cases in the past week.

Updates About Mandarin Orchard Singapore Incident

MOH has completed the special testing operations to test all individuals serving SHN at Mandarin Orchard Singapore, as well as staff of the hotel.

In total, 394 persons serving SHN at the hotel have been swabbed. Of these, 391 were tested negative while 3 were tested positive on 20 December and were immediately conveyed to the hospital via ambulance.

As they have recent travel history, it is likely that these are imported cases who were infected while they were overseas.

Nevertheless the National Public Health Laboratory will conduct whole genome sequencing and phylogenetic analysis to determine if they could be linked to the 13 cases.

In total, they have tested 571 staff of Mandarin Orchard Singapore, and 570 Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test results have come back negative for COVID-19 infection.

MOH is facilitating testing for the remaining individual who has yet to be PCR tested.

The serological tests of 8 more staff have come back positive, indicating likely past infections, in addition to the 3 announced yesterday.

Epidemiological investigations of these 11 cases are in progress

In the meantime, MOH will test their identified close contacts as a precautionary measure, and also conduct serological tests to determine if these individuals could have been infected by them.

Feature Image: Rajaraman Arumugam / Shutterstock.com (Image is for illustration purpose only)