Singapore — In a comment on Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s Facebook page on Thursday (Sept 30), Mr Tan Kin Lian asked if a health kit of “vitamins and therapeutic drugs” could be given to people with Covid who are part of the Home Recovery programme.
Starting from Sept 18, younger and fully vaccinated Covid patients have been encouraged to recover from the virus in their own homes, in order to free up hospitals to be able to attend to more gravely ill patients amid the steep rise in new infections in the past few weeks.
The Prime Minister had shared on Monday (Sept 26) a guide on Home Recovery from the Ministry of Health, including how patients would be supported during their recovery period.
He also added links to resources Home Recovery patients would find helpful.
In one of the links PM Lee provided, it says that patients would need to monitor their temperature, pulse rate and oxygen saturation. Patients who have no thermometer and pulse oximeter would be included in the Care Pack sent to them.
Mr Tan, a businessman and a 2011 presidential candidate, suggested some additions to the Care Pack, writing:
“Dear PM
Can the govt provide a health kit for infected persons placed on home recovery. This kit should comprise 1 week’s supply of vitamins and therapeutic drugs.
We can follow the practice in Indonesia and Uttar Pradesh in India. They managed to reduce their infections and deaths by over 90% compared to its peak a few months ago.”
However, while vitamins B, C, and D, as well as zinc, have been recommended to boost one’s immune health during the pandemic, there are currently no therapeutic drugs for Covid-19, especially for those with mild cases of the virus.
For Covid patients who are hospitalised, only one drug was approved by the United States Centers for Disease Control, remdesivir.
As for the anti-parasitic drug Ivermectin, which Mr Tan seemingly endorses as a credible treatment option for Covid based on his other posts, epidemiologists are now saying that the literature behind the claims of its effectivity has been based on “a deep well of fraudulent research.”
“Not just one or two problematic papers, but a staggering volume of studies that appear to either be so fatally flawed that they cannot be trusted or research that literally never happened at all,” wrote one epidemiologist in a recent article. /TISG
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Tan Kin Lian does not agree Ong Ye Kung should step down as Health Minister