Calvin Cheng addresses why only the unvaccinated are being tested

Singapore — In one of his latest Facebook posts, former Nominated Member of Parliament (NMP) Calvin Cheng addressed questions regarding why only the unvaccinated had to be tested for the Covid-19 virus.

In his post, Mr Cheng mentioned that he saw many comments from netizens questioning why only those who are unvaccinated need to be tested for the virus.

According to Mr Cheng’s post, several people are of the opinion that vaccinated people are more dangerous since they can get infected too but will manifest fewer symptoms.

Following that logic, vaccinated people should be tested too to ensure that they are not infected by the Covid-19 virus.

 “This is false,” Mr Cheng refuted. He mentioned that he found several papers that cited the rate of breakthrough cases of Covid-19 to be between 0.1% and 0.29%.

“This is a very small percentage,” Mr Cheng adds.

While the world is observing many more vaccinated people testing positive, this is due to the fact that the infections are being viewed in terms of absolute numbers rather than a percentage.

Even in a large group of 3 million people, 0.29% of the group still adds up to 8700 people, which can seem like a significant number. This leads to several people assuming that the vaccines are not working well, and also leads them to conclude that the majority of the infected are vaccinated.

“The vaccines work,” Mr Cheng established.

There are many more vaccinated people getting infected than the unvaccinated because the vaccinated constitute a great proportion of the population. A small percentage of a very large number can still look big, which may give others the impression that vaccinations do not work.

“Therefore we test the unvaccinated,” Mr Cheng concludes. “People should pay attention to simple statistics in school.”

You Zi Xuan is an intern at The Independent SG. /TISG