Singapore now has most coronavirus cases in South East Asia. What happened?

Singapore overtook Indonesia in coronavirus infections and now has the most cases in Southeast Asia after the city-state detected hundreds more victims among low-wage foreign workers.

Authorities said an additional 596 cases were confirmed as of noon Sunday, bringing the total to 6,558 in the country. Of the 596, only 25 are Singaporeans or permanent residents, the health ministry said in a statement.

Since late March, the Southeast Asian nation has seen a surge in local transmissions that’s largely affected foreign workers housed in tightly packed dormitories, further complicating efforts to curb the spread. The government has tightened entry rules, mandated masks, poured billions of dollars into the economy and imposed a weeks-long partial lockdown to contain the outbreak.

With the new tally, Singapore moved ahead of Indonesia, which now has 6,558 cases, and the Philippines with 6,087 cases. The two countries are expected to release their latest figures later on Sunday.

Less than a month ago, Singapore was being hailed as one of the countries that had got its coronavirus response right.

Encouragingly for the rest of the world, the city-state seemed to have suppressed cases without imposing the restrictive lockdown measures endured by millions elsewhere.

And then the second wave hit, hard. Since March 17, Singapore’s number of confirmed coronavirus cases grew from 266 to over 5,900, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

So what went wrong?

The answer appears to lie in overlooked clusters of cases among migrant workers living in cramped dormitories and an underestimation of the speed at which those infections could spread through a city where lockdown measures had not been put in place.

Life as normal

At first, Singapore’s status as a small island nation seemed to pay off.

Changi Airport of Singapore. The country has cancelled a number of flights to countries that had issued entry bans (Photo: Xinhua/VNA)

It was able to contain the initial wave of cases from China by instituting quarantines and contact tracing to ensure that anyone arriving by air, who might have been exposed, was isolated and monitored.

At the same time, it ramped up public awareness campaigns to encourage people to take precautions. Isolation wards installed in hospitals in the wake of the 2003 SARS epidemic also meant that patients were treated in the safest way possible, preventing medical staff from becoming infected.

Most importantly, wrote Dale Fisher, chair of infection control at the National University of Singapore’s hospital in an opinion piece: “Singapore didn’t let positive patients back into the community.”

People with few or no symptoms, but who had nevertheless tested positive for the virus were hospitalized until they returned a negative test, rather than put in home quarantine, Fisher said.

By testing widely and isolating all those who were potentially contagious, Singapore was able to remain relatively open and continue functioning as usual.

“In Singapore, we want life to go on as normal,” Fisher wrote last month, before the latest spike in cases. “We want businesses, churches, restaurants and schools to stay open. This is what success looks like. Everything goes forward with modifications as needed, and you keep doing this until there’s a vaccine or a treatment.”

Compiled by Vietnam Insider/ CNN/ Bangkok Post