Update on 18 April 2020, 12:28am: MOH has released the full announcement which you can read here.

Today’s announcement is highly anticipated, simply because it’s the 11th day of the Circuit Breaker—over in New Zealand, they started to see results on the 11th day after they “locked down” their country.

While we can’t depend on just one country’s results to determine if our measures are working, it’s at least something to look forward to: have our days of eating instant noodles paid off?

Well, for a start, if you think you’re getting the results with this article, I’d have to apologise for clickbaiting you in, though we did decide whether to publish this first or wait till tonight.

But since everyone’s talking about it…why not?

623 New COVID-19 Cases in S’pore Today (17 Apr)

Usually, MOH would release the official full announcement at night, and people like me have to stare at the computer screen for hours because the timing isn’t the same every day.

But today, MOH has decided to post a “teaser”.

It releases a statement, saying that as of noon today (17 April 2020), they have  “preliminarily confirmed an additional 623 cases of COVID-19 infection in Singapore, the majority of whom are foreign workers in the dormitories.”

This brings the total number of cases to 5,050.

They are still working through the details of the cases and “further updates will be shared via the MOH press release that will be issued later tonight.”

What a cliffhanger.

After all, we want to know what’s the number for community spread, because that’s what matters to us most: have our efforts paid off? Are we seeing results?

Nevertheless, we’d have to wait till tonight to know the results.

But here’s some context based on the trend of community spread in the last two weeks.

Singapore’s coronavirus numbers in the local community have remained stable over the past two weeks, which is a positive sign, contrary to what the high numbers in the last week suggest.

While we have 48 new cases in the community yesterday, the number of new cases in the community has decreased slightly based on average cases, from an average of 38 cases per day in the week before, to an average of 37 per day in the past week.

This is a chart based on community spread, with the orange bars being Singaporeans or Singapore PRs and the green bar being permit holders who don’t live in dormitories.

So this is the chart that’d determine if our efforts are paying off, and if it starts to drop, we might finally be able to have our meals in the hawker centres soon.

Stay tuned tonight.

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