Singapore — Is 50 the magic number?
Madam Ho Ching thinks so. She says that one good indicator of stability in the local Covid-19 situation is the number of people intubated in ICUs at any one time.
She thinks that number should be no more than 50.
She took to Facebook on Wednesday morning (Nov 10) to say that Singapore’s Covid situation is “still not quite in a stable phase,” adding that one good indicator of stability is the number of people at any one time who are in intensive care and intubated,.
A prolific commentator on Facebook, Madam Ho is the wife of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and former CEO of Temasek Holdings.
Madam Ho is now a director of Temasek Trust, which was established by Temasek Holdings in 2007 to provide governance and financial oversight of endowments for the Temasek Foundation, Stewardship Asia Centre, and Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory.
She has consistently tracked Singapore’s progress through the pandemic.
She also cautioned that with dining curbs relaxed from today to allow up to five members of the same household allowed to dine in restaurants, it is necessary to monitor whether case numbers will rise again in three to four weeks.
She cited a large-scale study from the United States that said restaurant visits were the Number One factor linked to upticks in infections. Smaller scale contact tracing case studies in China and Korea provide further evidence of this.
“We know masking prevents transmission esp of the large droplets, and also cuts down breathing in of large droplets and fine aerosol.
And what do we do when we dine in?
We remove our mask, not just to eat, but we chat, and laugh – and these produces droplets and aerosols to add to the air around us,” she added.
She thinks indoor establishments should have systems that clean and change the air frequently or install good quality air filtering systems.
“The art and science of clean air in enclosed spaces should be part and parcel of the transition towards living with Covid, and could be part of the public health infrastructure to help reduce the risk of future respiratory pandemics,” she wrote.
She also tackled the question of when the country should be considered at a more manageable and “stable” phase.
“..this is not a static situation…one good indicator is to have no more than 50 intubated ICU cases at any one time, or less than 100 ICU cases including the non-intubated high-risk folks on close monitoring.”
As most of the people needing treatment in ICUs are senior citizens, one key issue is still to ensure that as many seniors as possible are vaccinated against Covid-19.
“Today, we still have 64,000 seniors 60 years and older who are not vaccinated. If we can vaccinate 20,000 more of our unvaxxed seniors, we will be able to relax the pressure head into the ICU, and bring that down to the 50 mark for intubated ICU,” she added.
She appealed to readers to “help step up to persuade the (seniors) to be vaccinated”.
“And with higher vaccinations among our seniors, we can mitigate the increased risks of more infections from relaxing our dining, and enable us to progressively relax the dining in numbers over the next few months,” she added. /TISG
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