Ong Ye Kung: Omicron wave in SG has peaked, but hospitals still under stress 

In an update to the Covid-19 situation in Singapore, Health Minister Ong Ye Kung said that the Omicron wave has reached its peak.

Daily case counts are showing that “the Omicron wave has clearly peaked,” he wrote in a Facebook post on Saturday (Mar 19). He added that the week-on-week Covid case ratio is now at nearly 0.7, while it had been over 0.9 a few days ago.

Furthermore, Mr Ong wrote that the number of people hospitalised because of COVID-19 “is falling gradually, with a lag compared to the fall in daily cases.”

He cautioned, however, that “hospitals are still very busy and under stress” because of the large number of Emergency Department admissions of cases unrelated to Covid-19.

These patients are individuals with chronic diseases that have gotten worse in the past two years while hospitals and clinics have been busy battling the pandemic. 

And the Health Minister underlined the distinction that “Many of these patients are admitted to hospitals with COVID-19, and not because of COVID-19.”

To make his point even clearer, he wrote that out of every one hundred patients admitted to hospitals’ emergency departments, nearly all (90 to 95 per cent) are because of acute medical emergencies or worsening chronic medical conditions.

From among these admissions, Mr Ong added that around 20 per cent had an incidental Covid-19 diagnosis, and five per cent were admitted for Covid-specific treatments.

“At MOH, we call this the Business-As-Usual (BAU) debt, which has to be repaid. And the debt repayment is coming at us ferociously. We hope this situation will ease in the coming couple of weeks.

Week-on-week changes in daily cases, and ED hospital admissions, are two numbers that we are watching closely, as we plan our next set of easing measures,” he added, attaching two salient graphs that would illustrate this further.

In its latest update on Mar 20, the Ministry of Health said that there are 7,859 new Covid-19 cases, as well as 4 deaths. 

Singapore broke the one million mark recently, with a total of 1,007,158 cases reported since the pandemic began, with 1,194 deaths in all.

However, 427,897 cases were reported just in the past four weeks, 99.7 per cent of whom had no or only mild symptoms.

Singapore has one of the highest vaccine rates in the world, with 92 per cent of the country’s total population having completed the full regimen of vaccine doses. Seventy-one per cent of the total population have also received a booster shot. /TISG

Ong Ye Kung: Almost half are S’poreans, mostly seniors, vaccination status lapsed for not taking booster shots