Today’s a rather goody day.
Other than McDonald’s outlets finally opening their doors and IKEA announcing that they’re opening yet another outlet here in Singapore, the number of new COVID-19 cases remain stable.
Today, 486 cases were reported. Do note that the lower number of cases today is partly due to fewer tests being processed at a testing laboratory as it is recalibrating its apparatus for one of the test kits, which is explained at the later part of this article.
This means there are now 23,822 cases here in Singapore.
Of these cases, 2 are Singaporeans or Singapore PRs. Yesterday, this figure was 3, with 1 of them being imported.
The majority of today’s cases are migrant workers living in dormitories.
On average, based on yesterday’s numbers, the number of new cases in the community has decreased, from an average of 11 cases per day in the week before, to an average of 9 per day in the past week. The number of unlinked cases in the community has also decreased, from an average of 5 cases per day in the week before, to an average of 4 per day in the past week.
And there’s more: it turns out that 33 cases that were confirmed positive might not be true as they’re “false positive”, so the number of cases might be lower now.
But what happened?
33 False-Positive Results
Yesterday (10 May 2020), it was reported that 33 patients who tested positive for Covid-19 actually wasn’t infected. It was an “apparatus calibration issue” with one of its test kits, the Ministry of Health (MOH) announced.
They added that they regularly review the laboratory tests and found 33 of them to be “false positives”. After retesting at the National Public Health Laboratory, they confirmed that the 33 cases tested negative.
So far, from their review, they’ve not come across “false negatives”, cases where Covid-19 patients test negative.
Also, now, it turns out that instead of 4, maybe only 1 healthcare staff from S’pore Expo has been confirmed to be COVID-19 positive, as 1 of them is a false positive while the other 2 returned “equivocal” results: results which are uncertain and ambiguous. They had both tested negative for Covid-19 upon re-testing.
To be on the safe side, the ministry classified them as positive cases while they send their results for retesting at the National Public Health Laboratory.
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