Singapore — Madam Ho Ching, the wife of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, wrote in a Sunday evening (Oct 10) Facebook post that Singapore is going through an “exit wave.”
The phrase came from an Oct 10 article from New Zealand website Stuff entitled “Covid-19 NZ: Singapore, the country that decided to let Covid in.”
“Sg is going through an exit wave,” wrote Mdm Ho, adding “Covid is a preventable death with vaccination. So how about it, folks?”
The article’s author, Keith Lynch, explains the pandemic situation in Singapore, and then takes a look at the lessons New Zealand can learn from what Singapore is going through.
He acknowledges Singapore’s high vaccination rate as well as the recent surge in cases and rises in the number of people in hospitals as well as Covid-related deaths.
“How would that make you feel? Well, Singapore – a country that experts agree may offer a glimpse into New Zealand’s future – is grappling with just this,” he asks, adding, “Singapore’s approach to Covid-19 in many ways mirrored Aotearoa’s. It embraced elimination for a long time until it decided that it was “no longer possible”.
As for the term “exit wave,” Mr Lynch credits it to Professor Adam Kucharski, an infectious-disease modeller at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
He quotes Prof Kucharski as saying, “even if countries were to vaccinate 100 per cent of their population with current vaccines, it wouldn’t necessarily be enough to stop transmission of Delta if all control measures were lifted.”
Mr Lynch goes on to write that some public health experts consider allowing Covid infections as not necessarily a bad thing.
He quoted the dean of the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at the National University of Singapore, Prof Teo Yik-Ying, as telling CNBC that “infection will not have any short-term or long-term consequence” on the health of those already vaccinated, “but may additionally trigger a natural immune response which reduces the chance of subsequent infection.”
And while some were alarmed at the high numbers of Covid cases after the emphasis had been on zero Covid for the past year, NCID’s Professor Dale Fisher told the author, “When the numbers skyrocketed, it looked like the government was failing. But in fact, it was an expected increase, because we were removing the restrictions.”
Hence, Singapore’s current wave of infections can be called an “exit wave” due to restrictions being eased. Accepting the virus as endemic means not lifting all restrictions at once, but in stages, in order to manage infections and not overwhelm the healthcare system.
And while the number of infections in Singapore has increased, 98 per cent of those who test positive for Covid are asymptomatic or mild.
Moreover, 69 per cent of those who died were unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated, which is likely why Mdm Ho made her point that death from Covid is preventable with vaccination. /TISG