Singapore — With the government urging people to limit social interactions on Monday (Sept 6), many are expressing frustration with the seemingly mixed messages from the authorities who have said that infections are endemic and that people must learn to live with Covid, but at the same time tighten restrictions when case numbers rise. 

One Singaporean, Mr Lim Jialiang, called it “laughable when medical experts have said we can afford to open up more, when our political class says otherwise.”

In a Facebook post on Monday night, he wrote that if politicians don’t have real answers to this “political quagmire” then “it’s high time that they say so, and not pretend that they have all the answers.”

He began his post by writing that he could feel others’ frustrations with the situation. 

Mr Lim wrote, “Walk a mile in our shoes and feel the paranoia that develops whenever you vacillate from statement to statement. 

From COVID-resilience to saying we should cut down our movement. 

From majority of cases are asymptomatic and mild illnesses to reviving the bogeyman that we will have thousands of cases if we don’t cut down on social interactions.”

These warnings, he wrote, had been said in mid-July, without dire consequences.

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The crowds now present at eateries, malls and other public spaces, Mr Lim added, attest to vaccines working “tremendously well.”

“Maybe before Singaporeans learn how to live with the virus, our politicians should learn how to be leaders. What message does it send whenever you talk a big game about reopening for business to the world when you change your tune in a literal weekend?”, he added.

The problem seems to be that the government telling people to be prepared for the number of Covid cases to rise, as Health Minister Ong Ye Kung did lately, yet hinting that restrictions will be imposed again.

This, Mr Lim said, “makes a mockery of the sacrifices that we have made and will continue to make,” adding that authorities seem to be “getting cold feet as we look at three digit caseloads.”

And while he wrote that he does not want to get infected with the Delta variant, he added that he does not “use COVID-19 to be the lynchpin of my decision-making to the detriment of everything else. I’m vaccinated, I’m youngish. I have no apparent co-morbidites.” 

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He enumerated the costs of the pandemic “that are being subsidied by Singaporeans,” such as “F&B and Fitness companies who are tired of the high-handed closures, teachers who have reached their breaking point due to COVID-19 exacerbating common stress points like class sizes and administrative workload, the working-class who bear the brunt every time, physically and financially, whenever a lockdown happens.”

“We are still waiting for the first tranches of relief for HA, and here is Lawrence Wong talking about a third lockdown,” he added. /TISG

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