The circuit breaker measures, which came in on 7 Apr, has finally reached its 11th day.
Last week, PM Lee took to his Facebook page to highlight that Day 11 is the day where Singaporeans can expect to see if the CB actually works.
He had talked to his good friend from New Zealand (read: the PM of New Zealand) who said that they saw the results on Day 11.
Here’s The Result in a Nutshell
The number of new Covid-19 cases in Singapore continues shooting up like Sheng Siong’s stock prices which made the founder’s family billionaires.
The main culprit of this drastic increase comes from the 43 dormitories in Singapore, and 12 of them has been gazetted as isolation areas.
That’s the bad news.
The good news, however, is that community transmission cases have actually dropped from an average of 40 cases a day in the past week to an average of 32 cases a day this week.
That doesn’t mean, however, that Singaporeans can start to anyhowly go out and breach safe distancing measures like these 400 people did.
The Ministry of Health (MOH) said that they still have to monitor the status carefully as they’re now worried about how it’s getting harder to link unlinked cases.
Experts Weigh In On Day 11 Results
Professor Ooi Eng Eong from Duke-NUS Medical School says the number of new Covid-19 cases indicates how the virus spreads five to eight days ago based on the average incubation period of the Covid-19 virus.
The fact that the number of new community transmission has plateaued last week showed that it’s working, he concludes.
Meanwhile, Dr Dale Fisher from the National University Hospital (NUH) says that with community transmission being stable, Singapore might expect to start seeing reduced numbers in local community cases next week.
Dr Leong Hoe Nam, an infectious diseases specialist, agrees that the CB is showing an early sign of success.
However, he warns that if Singaporeans were to anyhowly breach the elevated measures, any progress seen could be gone in a matter of “days”.
The Key To The CB Working Is Singaporeans Themselves
So far, the authorities have been issuing thousands of advisories, warnings and issuing hundreds of fines to people who are found breaking safe distancing measures.
However, that’s not enough.
Because the key to us winning against the Covid-19 pandemic isn’t the authorities deploying a million enforcement officers to keep the other 4.9 million people in check.
It’s Singaporeans themselves complying with all the rules put into place.
Dr Leong says:
“Absolute compliance is needed to clear all the community cases… If everyone obeys the circuit breaker rules, then the only person you can infect is your family, and thereafter the virus cannot pass on to anyone.”
Lockdowns were proven to work against Covid-19 in countries like New Zealand, Italy and China.
So if it doesn’t work in Singapore, it’s the fault of Singaporeans and other people living in Singapore.
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If, the experts say, if Singaporeans were to continue complying with the rules even though they’re going crazy staying at home, we can start to see positive results “soon”.
As for why CB isn’t working for foreign workers?
That’s because each dormitory is like its own town.
Most of us have four people, give or take, to interact with when we go home.
These foreign workers have thousands of people to interact with.
For a perfect example, just check out what happened to the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship which got its own entry on the John Hopkin’s interactive map.
P/S: The John Hopkins map typically tabulates results from countries, not a single ship.
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