Singapore—As one of the first countries to treat Covid-19 as endemic, the Little Red Dot is being closely watched to provide an example of how to exit the pandemic safely.
A Nov 8 piece in The Daily Beast titled This Is What a COVID Endgame Looks Like tackles this, even as author David Axe acknowledges that Singapore’s circumstances are quite dissimilar to other countries.
“Singapore may be showing us the surprising way the pandemic could end in certain countries: with a surge in cases as the last restrictions on gatherings, businesses and schools finally lift, but a wall of immunity that prevents those cases from landing in the hospital—or, worse, the morgue.”
Mr Axe compared Singapore’s high vaccination rate of 94 per cent of people over the age of 12, with that of the United States, where under 60 per cent have received both jabs.
He pointed out that despite the high vaccination rate, Singapore is easing restrictions slowly, and yet has experienced the biggest surge of new infections in the past few weeks.
“A dozen deaths a day amid a huge spike in mostly asymptomatic infections is the discounted price super-vaccinated Singapore is paying for getting back to something resembling normal,” writes Mr Axe.
However, he cautions that the price the US pays in its return to normalcy may be far steeper, because of its much lower vaccine rate.
In the US, he writes, 20 percent say they’ll never get jabbed. “Unless something changes, the United States might never build the same wall of immunity that Singapore built before it began dropping COVID restrictions.
“That means that when the last few limits on schools, businesses and gatherings finally end in the U.S., the resulting spike in infections—a likely step toward endemicity—might kill a lot more people.”
The Daily Beast is hardly the only international news site keeping a close watch on Singapore’s steps.
When the Multi-ministry Task Force (MTF) announced at a press conference on Nov 8 that those who remain unvaccinated from Covid-19 by choice and get infected will have to pay their own medical bills from Dec 8, this was covered in The Guardian, The New York Times, Washington Post, Business Insider, news outlets in Australia and New Zealand, and again, in The Daily Beast.
Also, when Finance Minister Lawrence Wong, who co-chairs the MTF, announced that from Nov 10., food and beverage establishments can play “soft recorded music”, it was covered in a CNN article. /TISG